Caltech Faculty Honored with New Horizons Prizes
Kimmy Wu and Vesselin Dimitrov honored for physics and math research
Two Caltech professors were awarded 2026 New Horizons Prizes as part of the Breakthrough Foundation's annual prize ceremony, known colloquially as the "Oscars of Science." Wai Ling (Kimmy) Wu, assistant professor of physics at Caltech, has received a New Horizons in Physics prize for her "advances in cosmic microwave background and supernovae cosmology," according to the foundation.
Vesselin Dimitrov, professor of mathematics, was awarded a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize for his "work in Diophantine geometry, including the proof of the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture and new irrationality results for special values of Dirichlet L-series." Dimitrov was awarded the prize jointly with Yunqing Tang, a Caltech professor of mathematics on leave and currently at UC Berkeley. The award citation for the honor notes that this combined work was done jointly with Frank Calegari of the University of Chicago.
Wu is an observational cosmologist, which means she analyzes data captured by ground-based telescopes and space missions in search of clues to the origins of our universe. Specifically, she is interested in searching for evidence of cosmic inflation, a brief period in our universe's earliest moments when it is thought to have dramatically expanded in size. She is a member of the BICEP and South Pole Telescope teams, which are making precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a pattern of ancient light that pervades our entire sky. Wu specifically looks at an effect called CMB lensing, in which the signal is subtly distorted due to gravitational effects, and she has developed new ways to integrate machine learning into the analysis of CMB data. She is also working with colleagues to develop the next CMB-mapping space mission.
Her honors include an Early Career Award from the US Department of Energy and a Panofsky Fellowship from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
"Kimmy's ability to tackle the most complex data challenges in multi-epoch cosmology using modern data-driven methodologies makes her a truly deserving recipient of the New Horizons Prize," says David Hsieh, the Donald A. Glaser Professor of Physics at Caltech and the executive officer for physics.
Dimitrov specializes in number theory, Diophantine geometry, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and harmonic analysis. One example of his recent work involves the sum of a series of infinite numbers, a value known as a Dirichlet L-value. Along with Calegari and Tang, Dimitrov proved that the sum of this infinite series is an irrational number, a hard problem that went unsolved for decades. The work builds on a long history of open problems surrounding infinite series, stretching back as far as Leonard Euler, who worked on related problems in the 18th century.
Dimitrov was recently co-awarded three math prizes: the 2025 Salem Prize, the 2026 American Mathematical Society Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory, and the 2025 Fermat Prize.
"Vesselin has a smart way of connecting ideas that might not seem related, and this work could pave the way to solving other problems," says Elena Mantovan, the Taussky-Todd-Lonergan Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, and the executive officer for mathematics.