Chinese Mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng Win the 2026 Fields Medals
On July 23, at the opening of the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, the International Mathematical Union announced the new Fields Medalists: Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng, alongside John Pardon of the United States and Jacob Tsimerman of Canada. It is the first time two mathematicians who did their undergraduate studies at a university in mainland China have won in the same year; both are members of Peking University's class of 2007 entrants.
Awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty and often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, each Fields Medal carries a cash prize of 15,000 Canadian dollars and a gold medal bearing the likeness of Archimedes.
Wang, 35, is a professor at New York University's Courant Institute and holds a permanent professorship at France's IHES. With her collaborator Joshua Zahl, she resolved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem open for more than a century. She is the third woman in history to win a Fields Medal, and the first Chinese woman to do so.
Deng, 37, a professor at the University of Chicago, was honored for breakthrough work on Hilbert's sixth problem — posed by David Hilbert in 1900, it asks how the behavior of a gas can be derived from the laws governing individual particles. Deng began his undergraduate studies at Peking University, transferred to MIT, and earned his doctorate at Princeton. (GSM, based on the International Mathematical Union and public reporting)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：菲尔兹奖奖章正面，刻有阿基米德头像。图片来源：Wikimedia Commons（CC BY 4.0，Ida Berger 摄）。Photo: The obverse of the Fields Medal, bearing the likeness of Archimedes. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0), photo by Ida Berger.
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