2026

Abel Prize 2026

Abel Prize

Gerd Faltings

In 1983, Faltings proved the Mordell conjecture: that a curve of genus greater than one has only finitely many rational points. The proof introduced techniques in arithmetic geometry so powerful that the Fields Medal followed three years later. The 2026 Abel Prize, announced 19 March, recognised that body of work — tools for arithmetic geometry and the resolution of long-standing diophantine conjectures — as one of the defining contributions to twentieth-century mathematics.

Turing Award (2025, announced 2026)

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Charles H. Bennett · Gilles Brassard

Bennett and Brassard invented quantum key distribution in 1984: the BB84 protocol, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics rather than computational difficulty to guarantee that eavesdropping on a communication leaves detectable traces. Their collaboration across four decades also produced quantum teleportation and foundational ideas in quantum error correction — the theoretical bedrock of the machines now trying to demonstrate quantum advantage.

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences 2026

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Jean Bennett · Katherine A. High · Albert Maguire · Stuart H. Orkin · Swee Lay Thein · Rosa Rademakers · Bryan Traynor

Three teams shared the prize, announced 18 April. Bennett, High, and Maguire developed the first FDA-approved gene therapy for inherited retinal degeneration, restoring sight in children who would otherwise have gone blind. Orkin and Thein elucidated the molecular switch between fetal and adult haemoglobin, validating reactivating fetal haemoglobin as a strategy for treating sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassaemia. Rademakers and Traynor discovered the C9orf72 repeat expansion as the most common genetic cause of both ALS and frontotemporal dementia, connecting two devastating diseases that had previously seemed unrelated.

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics 2026

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

Frank Merle

Merle received the prize on 18 April for a series of breakthroughs in nonlinear evolution equations — understanding when solutions remain stable, when they form singularities, and when they decompose into solitons. His work has fundamentally reshaped how mathematicians think about the long-time behaviour of dispersive and wave equations.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2026

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Muon g-2 Collaborations (CERN, Brookhaven, Fermilab) · David J. Gross

The muon's anomalous magnetic moment — the degree to which it wobbles in a magnetic field — has been measured at CERN, Brookhaven, and Fermilab over decades with increasing precision, probing the Standard Model at a level where discrepancies between theory and experiment might reveal new physics. Those collaborations shared the prize on 18 April; a Special Breakthrough Prize went separately to David Gross for asymptotic freedom and a lifetime of contributions to theoretical physics.

EAST tokamak exceeds Greenwald density limit

In January, China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak achieved stable plasma at 1.3 to 1.65 times the Greenwald limit — the theoretical ceiling on how dense a plasma can be before it becomes unmanageable. Operating stably above that ceiling validates a density-free regime that future fusion reactors will need to exploit.

Self-replicating polymerase ribozyme supports RNA World hypothesis

In February, researchers produced a polymerase ribozyme — an RNA molecule that can copy RNA, including, critically, a version of itself. The RNA World hypothesis holds that life began with self-replicating RNA molecules before DNA and proteins arrived; this is the most direct experimental support that such a molecule can exist.

Vera Rubin Observatory announces over 11,000 new solar system asteroids

In April, the Vera Rubin Observatory released a catalogue of more than 11,000 newly identified solar system objects — trans-Neptunian bodies, near-Earth asteroids, objects whose existence had been inferred but not confirmed. The release was a demonstration of what a survey telescope built to observe the entire southern sky every few nights can do to the census of small bodies.

Artemis II: first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo

On 1 April, NASA's Artemis II launched aboard the Space Launch System with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. On 6 April, the Orion capsule flew within 6,545 km of the Moon and set a new record for crewed spaceflight distance at 252,760 miles from Earth, surpassing even Apollo 13. The crew splashed down on 10 April. For the first time in more than fifty years, human beings had been to the vicinity of the Moon.

Ariane 64 maiden flight delivers Amazon satellites

On 12 February, the four-booster heavy-lift variant of Ariane 6 made its maiden flight from French Guiana, placing 32 Amazon Project Kuiper satellites into low Earth orbit. Capable of lifting up to 21.6 tonnes to LEO, the Ariane 64 doubled European heavy-launch capacity and restored independent European access to large-payload orbits after years of depending on commercial providers.

Death of J. Craig Venter

J. Craig Venter

Venter founded Celera Genomics and led one of the two teams that produced the first draft sequence of the human genome in 2000, using whole-genome shotgun sequencing where others considered the approach too chaotic to work. He died in San Diego on 29 April at age 79, having also been the first person to have his own genome sequenced, which seems like the sort of thing he would have arranged.

Death of Paul R. Ehrlich

Paul R. Ehrlich

Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" predicted catastrophe with a specificity that time mostly disproved, and was read by more people than almost any science book of its era. The predictions failed; the underlying concern about population, resources, and ecological limits did not disappear. As a working scientist, he pioneered the study of coevolution between plants and insects. He died on 13 March at age 93.

Death of Heisuke Hironaka

Heisuke Hironaka

Hironaka's 1964 proof of resolution of singularities in characteristic zero — showing that any algebraic variety can be smoothed out without changing its essential structure — earned the 1970 Fields Medal and is considered one of the most technically demanding results in algebraic geometry. He died in Tokyo on 18 March at age 94.

Death of William Alvin Howard

William Alvin Howard

Howard discovered what is now called the Curry–Howard correspondence: a deep structural isomorphism between formal proofs in intuitionistic logic and programs in typed lambda calculi. A proof that something exists, it turns out, is the same thing as a program that produces it. That insight is the conceptual foundation of modern proof assistants and much of programming language theory. He died in Chicago on 13 March at age 99.

Death of Gladys West

Gladys West

West joined the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in 1956 and spent the following decades computing precise models of Earth's gravitational field, accounting for the irregularities in its shape that would otherwise make satellite-based navigation impossible. Her geodetic modelling provided the mathematical foundation for GPS. She died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 17 January at age 95.