The richest — and glitziest — science prizes in the world were presented Sunday evening to 12 men and women working on some of the hardest-to-solve problems imaginable, and who rarely see the limelight outside their tight academic circles.

Among the recipients of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes, which offer a total of $22 million in cash awards, are a team of physicists who helped describe the infancy of the universe, a biologist who is thinking about ways to use plants to fight climate change, and a UCSF biochemist working on a “miracle” molecule that could treat dozens of conditions.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded six years ago by a group of tech billionaires — including Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Yuri and Julia Milner — to celebrate transformative research in math, science and medicine.

Sunday’s awards ceremony was designed as a red-carpet gala more reminiscent of the Oscars than the more sedate, scholarly events that honor the sciences. Actor Morgan Freeman hosted the ceremony, held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, with presenters including filmmaker Ron Howard and actors Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Kerry Washington.

“I’m going to be more than a little uncomfortable,” joked Christopher Hacon, recipient of a prize in mathematics, before the event. “I’m definitely more comfortable in the math world. But this may be more appealing for a younger generation, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

Hacon, like many if not all of the recipients, is an international expert in a field so complicated that it can be difficult to describe his work in words a layperson would understand.

A professor of math at the University of Utah, his focus is on algebraic geometry and his work is primarily theoretical. There are real-world applications of his math, but they may not be discovered until long after his time, he said.

The physics prize went to a team of scientists who used a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, to create a descriptive map of the start of the universe. Some of those scientists are now using models built from these descriptions to test theories about how the universe began.

“Humans are innately curious, and curious about the big universe around us. The idea that we had the ability to probe these questions and get hard, fast answers — it’s fascinating to me,” said Charles Bennett, the Johns Hopkins University cosmologist who led WMAP. “And none of us know how far we can go with this.

“It’s fascinating, it’s exciting, it’s fun,” he said, “and it’s nice to be recognized for it.”

Thirty years into a career spent studying plant biology and genetics, Joanne Chory is now launching real-world applications of lab-based work. Chory, a scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla (San Diego County) who won a prize in life sciences, is leading an initiative that would use plants to lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and offer some buffer against climate change.

“We have this whole new initiative to try to save the world from ourselves, and I’m really excited to tell our story to everybody,” Chory said.

The only Breakthrough Prize recipient from the Bay Area is Peter Walter of UCSF, who studies at a molecular level how cells synthesize and use proteins, and what happens when protein regulation goes awry.

Decades of cellular biology research has led his team to study an exciting molecule that, in brain-damaged mice, can restore memory and function. Molecules with similar properties may someday prove useful in treating other kinds of neurological conditions or illnesses like diabetes.

Along with the cash awards, Walter appreciates that the Breakthrough Prize recognizes “explorers.” He and his co-recipients have spent their careers staring into the unknown, he said, and resolving to make some sense of it.

“I find it most exciting that there is such a huge effort here to bring basic, curiosity-driven research into the stage light,” Walter said, “and to have us explain to a broad audience what we are doing, what the possibilities are.”

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @erinallday

Breakthrough Prize winners

The team that launched the WMAP satellite, with special recognition going to the five leaders: Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University, Gary Hinshaw of the University of British Columbia, and Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page Jr. and David Spergel, all of Princeton University. The group shares the $3 million prize for physics.

Don Cleveland of UC San Diego, Kim Nasmyth of Oxford University, Peter Walter of UCSF, Kazutoshi Mori of Kyoto University (Japan) and Joanne Chory of The Salk Institute each win a $3 million prize in life sciences.

Christopher Hacon of the University of Utah and James McKernan of UC San Diego share a

$3 million math prize.