Fields Medal: Hong Wang makes history as star mathematicians claim 2026 honours

The Fields Medal — one of the top honours in mathematics — for 2026 was awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang.

The Medal is awarded every four years and recognises important contributions to mathematics research by people who are younger than 40 at the time they receive it.

Of this year’s laureates, Wang has become the third woman to win the Medal in its 90-year history, after Maryam Mirzakhani (2014) and Maryna Viazovska (2022). Wang and Deng are also the first Chinese nationals to win since Shing-Tung Yau in 1982.

Yu Deng

Deng was born in 1989 in Henan province and grew up in Shenzhen. He won a gold medal at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Later, in 2010, he became a Putnam Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S., where he obtained his BS in 2011. He finished his PhD from Princeton in 2015, was a Courant Instructor at New York University (2015-2018), and then assistant and finally full professor at the University of Southern California (2018-2024). Since September 2024, Deng has been professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago.

In 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 problems he thought would shape 20th century mathematics. Deng, together with Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma, solved one part of the sixth problem, in the course of which he built some of the strongest bridges to date between the physics we can observe — like water flowing down a stream — and the mathematics that is supposed to explain it, like the rules governing how individuals particles bounce off each other.

John Pardon

Pardon was born in 1989. He solved a 30-year-old problem — on the distortion of knots— while still an undergraduate student at Princeton, winning the Morgan Prize for it in 2012, and got his PhD from Stanford in 2015 under Yakov Eliashberg (who in 2024 delivered the TNQ Distinguished Lecture in Mathematics in Chennai). After being a Clay Research Fellow (2015-2020), Pardon became an assistant professor at Stanford, a professor at Princeton (2016-2023), and since September 2022 has been a professor at the Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook University.

Like Eliashberg, Pardon works in symplectic geometry — the mathematics used to describe how physical systems move, e.g. how a rock rolls down a hill or how planets orbit stars. He won the Fields Medal for solving the 20-year-old MNOP conjecture, about counting the number of curves on complicated geometric shapes called Calabi-Yau 3-folds. And en route he developed a branch called virtual foundation cycles, which other mathematicians have since used to solve similar problems.

Hong Wang

Born in 1991 in a village in Guangxi, Wang skipped two grades in primary school. At 16 years, she entered Peking University to study earth and space sciences and switched to mathematics a year later. Following an engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a master’s from Paris-Sud University (2014), both in France and a PhD from MIT, she was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study (2019-2021), assistant professor at University of California Los Angeles (2021), and finally professor at the NYU Courant Institute (2025).

Wang’s work focused on harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. She has been feted in particular for solving the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture along with Joshua Zahl. Say a needle is lying on a flat surface. What’s the least amount of area you’d need to be able to rotate it so that, at some point, it points in every possible direction? Mathematicians figured out the answer on a flat (2D) surface but the 3D problem turned out to be so hard that it lacked a full solution for half a century. Wang and Zahl published a 127-page proof describing their solution in 2025. Their work connects harmonic analysis (how functions can be broken into waves) and geometric measure theory (studying the sizes of geometric sets).

Jacob Tsimerman

Born in 1988 in Kazan, Russia, Tsimerman moved along with his family to Israel in 1990 and to Toronto in 1996. He won gold medals at the 2003 and 2004 IMO, and later finished his PhD at Princeton in 2011 and became a postdoc at Harvard. He returned to the University of Toronto in 2014 and is now a full professor there.

Tsimerman’s work lies at the intersection of number theory (the study of whole numbers — 0, 1, 2, 3, … — and their properties) and algebraic geometry (using geometric shapes to understand equations). Early in his career, he helped prove the André-Oort conjecture alongside Jonathan Pila and Ananth Shankar, winning the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2025. His Fields Medal work was more ambitious: he found ways to apply a tool called o-minimality from the field of mathematical logic in algebraic geometry and number theory, and proved Griffith’s conjecture. On the same day his Fields Medal was announced, Tsimerman announced he would be joining the Safety Research group at OpenAI.