UChicago Mathematician Yu Deng Receives the 19th World Outstanding Chinese Award in Chicago

CHICAGO — Chicago is a city in Cook County, Illinois. On the morning of Oct. 18, the World Chinese Business Investment Foundation presented the 19th World Outstanding Chinese Award to Yu Deng, a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, at a ceremony at the Wan Hao Restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown, honoring his pioneering contributions to mathematics. At the ceremony, Chester Chong, a representative of the organizer, presented Deng with the award plaque and trophy. According to Chicago Chinese-language community media, Illinois State Representative Theresa Mah and Huang Zhengdong, chairman of the Chinese American Association of Greater Chicago, were among the community leaders in attendance.

The World Outstanding Chinese Award, organized by the World Chinese Business Investment Foundation, recognizes outstanding achievements by Chinese professionals around the world. Local community media reported that Chester Chong, a representative of the organizer, said at the ceremony that Deng is "a young achiever and a pride of Chinese people worldwide."

Born in 1989 to a family from Kaifeng, Henan, Deng grew up in Shenzhen, attended Shenzhen Senior High School, and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2006. He entered Peking University in 2007 before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2015, held a postdoctoral position at New York University's Courant Institute and a faculty post at the University of Southern California, and joined the University of Chicago's mathematics department in 2024. His research focuses on partial differential equations, probability, and mathematical physics.

On July 23 this year, Deng received the Fields Medal at the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. Awarded by the International Mathematical Union every four years to mathematicians under 40, the medal is widely regarded as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics." Of this year's four medalists, Deng and New York University professor Hong Wang are both Chinese nationals — the first time Chinese nationals have won the Fields Medal; earlier medalists of Chinese descent include Shing-Tung Yau (1982) and Terence Tao. Deng and Wang both entered Peking University in 2007, a milestone GSM reported on July 23.

According to the IMU citation, Deng was honored for three contributions in partial differential equations: with collaborators, rigorously deriving the Boltzmann equation for rarefied gases from hard-sphere dynamics, a major advance on Hilbert's sixth problem, posed 125 years ago; deriving wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems; and developing probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.

(Sources: Chicago Chinese community media reports, Oct. 18; International Mathematical Union announcement; University of Chicago News. The photos and event information in this report were provided by the organizer.)

Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)

Photo: 主办方代表庄佩源（左）向邓煜教授颁授第19届「世界杰出华人奖」奖牌匾。主办方供图。 Photo: Chester Chong (left), a representative of the organizer, presents the award plaque of the 19th World Outstanding Chinese Award to Professor Yu Deng. Photo courtesy of the organizer.

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