By proving that systems long believed to be stable can still "blow up" to infinity, Professor Frank Merle has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, along with a US$3 million cash award.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, often referred to as the "Oscars of Science," announced the 2026 results on April 19.

"It came as a shock—it took me some time to recover. It's a great honor," the 64-year-old mathematician told Scientific American, an American popular science magazine.

Merle was recognized for his major contributions to the understanding of "nonlinear evolution equations," which are mathematical tools used to describe how waves, fluids such as water and air, and other dynamical systems change over time.

According to the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, among his most notable achievements is his work on the nonlinear version of the famous Schrödinger equation from quantum physics. In early work, he provided a complete classification of all the ways this equation's solutions can blow up.

He later proved that the defocusing version of the equation, long believed to be inherently stable, can in fact blow up in finite time. This highly surprising result exploited an unexpected connection to fluid dynamics and helped resolve a major open problem: identifying smooth solutions to the compressible Euler equations and Navier-Stokes equations in which the fluid's density and velocity become infinite, representing a complete breakdown of the fluid description.

While the $3 million prize is significant, Merle said he was even more excited by the fact that his new approach initially faced skepticism, with many doubting it would lead to meaningful results.

"When I found this new way of seeing these problems, most people were not convinced that I could produce something interesting. Then one problem fell and then another one, so of course now there's a lot of recognition of all this work," he told Scientific American.

Throughout his career, Merle's work has reshaped foundational assumptions in the field, building deep connections between mathematics and physics and opening new directions for solving long-standing unsolved problems.

In other work on the "soliton resolution conjecture," which predicts that disturbances in wave systems eventually decompose into stable wave structures, Merle and his collaborators developed the powerful channels of energy technique coupled with the concentration compactness method, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation said.

He also worked with other mathematicians to clarify how singularities form in Korteweg–de Vries equation (KdV-type equations), which describe phenomena ranging from shallow water waves to dangerous rogue waves in the ocean.

Merle is currently a professor of analysis at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies and also works at CY Cergy Paris University.

He earned his PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, taught at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and has received several major honors throughout his career, including delivering a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 and winning the Clay Research Award in 2023.

The Breakthrough Prize was established in 2012 to honor scientists, inspire young researchers, and promote science for global benefit. It was founded by scientists and entrepreneurs including physicist Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg.

The awards cover mathematics, fundamental physics, and life sciences. Additional awards, such as the New Horizons Prize and the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, recognize early-career scientists and are valued between $50,000 and $100,000.

To date, the Breakthrough Prizes are among the most valuable science awards globally, with total prize money this year reaching $18.75 million.

The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is widely regarded as the most lucrative award in the field, carrying a $3 million cash prize, more than double that of a Nobel Prize, and much larger than traditional honors like the Fields Medal (often called the "Nobel of Math") which offers about CA$15,000 (US$10,800). (VN Express)

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