[5] In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his "investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty.

It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional, in part as a result of their son having been administered an IQ test.

He was particularly inspired by two of his high school physics teachers, one of whom taught a course that helped students with the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

Wilczek was a finalist in 1967 and ultimately won fourth place, based on a mathematical project involving group theory.

[21] In 2014, Wilczek penned a letter, along with Stephen Hawking and two other scholars, warning that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".

[32] In 2022 he was awarded the Templeton Prize[33] for the work that reveals "a vision of a universe that he regards as embodying mathematical beauty at the scales of the magnificently large and unimaginably small".

In 1973, while a graduate student working with David Gross at Princeton University, Wilczek (together with Gross) discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction (or color charge) between them; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles.

According to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences when awarding Wilczek its Lorentz Medal in 2002,[35] This [asymptotic freedom] is a phenomenon whereby the building blocks which make up the nucleus of an atom – 'quarks' – behave as free particles when they are close together, but become more strongly attracted to each other as the distance between them increases.

If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.

[36][37] Wilczek named this new hypothetical particle the "axion" after a brand of laundry detergent,[38] while Weinberg called it "Higglet".

[41][42] In physics, an anyon is a type of quasiparticle that occurs only in two-dimensional systems, with properties much less restricted than fermions and bosons.

[45] Frank Wilczek, Dan Arovas, and Robert Schrieffer analyzed the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1984, proving that anyons were required to describe it.

[46][47] In 2020, experimenters from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and from the Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (C2N) reported in Science that they had made a direct detection of anyons.