Mathematical & Physical Sciences

Young star systems are a place of violent collisions. Rocks, comets, asteroids and larger objects carom off one another and coalesce, gradually turning the primordial dust and ice of a stellar nebula into planets and moons. The largest of these collisions, however, are expected to be rare over the hundreds of millions of years it takes to form a planetary system — perhaps one every 100,000 years.

Now, astronomers have seen the aftermath of two powerful collisions within a 20-year period around a nearby star called Fomalhaut. These are either lucky observations or a sign that...

A panel of UC Berkeley professors in the College of Letters & Science discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make more informed choices.

Today we are revisiting a Berkeley Talks episode in which a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices.

Panelists include:

This year's Nobel Prize winners were invited to officially accept their awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in a special ceremony this week. UC Berkeley faculty John Clarke and Omar Yaghi were among this year's Nobel laureates, in addition to UC Berkeley alumni Michel Devoret and John Martinis. Among other festivities, the weeklong celebration featured lectures delivered by the Nobelists. John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis were presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric...

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) awarded the 2026 Joseph L. Doob Prize to Maciej Zworski, UC Berkeley mathematics professor. Zworski shares this honor with Semyon Dyatlov (a former UC Berkeley faculty member), as the two are being honored for their 2019 AMS book, Mathematical Theory of Scattering Resonances. The Doob Prize recognizes "a single, relatively recent, outstanding research book that makes a seminal contribution to the research literature, reflects the highest standards of...