Four Young Mathematicians Awarded Prestigious Fields Medals

PHILADELPHIA — The International Mathematical Union awarded the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, to four mathematicians under the age of 40 on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia. The recipients — Hong Wang, Yu Deng, John Pardon, and Jacob Tsimerman — were recognized for solving some of the most intractable problems in mathematics, several of which had resisted resolution for over a century.

The 2026 cohort is historically notable on multiple fronts. Hong Wang became only the third woman to win the Fields Medal in its 90-year history, following Maryam Mirzakhani (2014) and Maryna Viazovska (2022). Wang and Yu Deng are the first Chinese-born recipients since Shing-Tung Yau in 1982, and the first time two Chinese nationals have received the award simultaneously. Jacob Tsimerman became the first mathematician based in Canada to win the prize.

The awards were presented against the backdrop of significant controversy. Over 2,300 mathematicians signed a petition calling for the ICM to be relocated outside the United States due to concerns about visa processing suspensions for 75 countries and immigration enforcement. The French, Cuban, and Brazilian mathematical societies all withdrew or declined participation, though the IMU proceeded with the congress in Philadelphia as planned.

A Historic Convergence of Breakthroughs

What makes this year’s cohort extraordinary is the concentration of resolved century-scale problems. The four winners collectively tackled open questions spanning fluid mechanics, geometry, number theory, and topology — all within the same four-year window.

Hong Wang and the Kakeya Conjecture

Wang, a permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France and a professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, solved the three-dimensional Kakeya set conjecture — a problem first posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917. The conjecture asks: if a set in three-dimensional space contains a unit line segment pointing in every possible direction, how large must that set be?

Working with collaborator Joshua Zahl of the University of British Columbia, Wang posted a 127-page proof on arXiv in February 2025. The proof introduced a multi-scale recursive analysis technique that mathematicians had sought for decades. Nets Katz of Rice University called it “a once-in-a-century kind of result”, while Terence Tao, himself a Fields Medalist, described it as a “masterpiece in geometric measure theory.”

The Kakeya conjecture sits at the foundation of a tower of three monumental conjectures in harmonic analysis. With the proof now established, mathematicians can begin working their way up that tower toward even more ambitious results.

Born in 1991 in Guilin, China, Wang was admitted to Peking University at age 16. She earned her PhD from MIT in 2019 under Larry Guth. In September 2025, she became the first woman ever granted tenure at IHES.

Yu Deng and Hilbert’s Sixth Problem

Deng, a professor at the University of Chicago, resolved one of David Hilbert’s 23 unsolved problems posed in 1900. Hilbert’s Sixth Problem asked whether the equations of fluid dynamics could be rigorously derived from the laws governing individual particle collisions — a question that had stumped mathematicians for 125 years.

The core obstacle was a fundamental tension: Newton’s equations for individual hard spheres are time-reversible, while the Navier-Stokes and Euler equations that govern fluids at the macroscopic level are not. In March 2025, Deng, together with Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma, posted a paper completing the chain — starting from a system of hard spheres undergoing elastic collisions, they derived the Boltzmann equation and then the incompressible Navier-Stokes-Fourier system and the compressible Euler equation, unifying two fundamentally different scales of physics.

According to New Scientist, Deng’s work “radically improved our understanding of how macroscopic behaviour arises from behaviour on much smaller scales.”

Born in Shenzhen, China in 1989, Deng won a gold medal at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad at age 16. He earned his PhD from Princeton in 2015.

John Pardon and the Art of Problem-Solving

Pardon, a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University, has a track record of solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he solved Gromov’s knot distortion problem, posed by Mikhail Gromov in 1983, proving that torus knots have distortion that grows at least as fast as a specific mathematical bound. The work earned him the 2012 Morgan Prize, the highest undergraduate mathematics award in the United States.

Pardon also proved the three-dimensional case of the Hilbert-Smith conjecture and the MNOP conjecture, a 20-year-old problem in algebraic geometry that counts curves on geometrical shapes relevant to quantum string theory. He developed the theory of implicit atlases for virtual fundamental classes in symplectic geometry, making rigorous the foundations of Floer homology.

“It’s hard to know at the time how much significance a given solution will have,” Pardon said in a pre-recorded video ahead of the announcement. “Certainly, finding the solution was not proportional to the interest it’s generated.”

Jacob Tsimerman and the Andre-Oort Conjecture

Tsimerman, a full professor at the University of Toronto, proved the Andre-Oort conjecture, which describes the distribution of “special points” on geometric spaces called Shimura varieties — objects central to the Langlands program connecting number theory, geometry, and representation theory.

Working with Jonathan Pila and Ananth Shankar, Tsimerman completed a full proof of the conjecture in 2021. Crucially, his proof is unconditional — earlier proofs had relied on the unproven Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. Tsimerman also introduced the concept of “o-minimality,” originating in mathematical logic, as a fundamental method in arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and his work on the Hodge conjecture — one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems — helped build a bridge between topology and algebra.

Born in Kazan, Russia in 1988, Tsimerman’s family moved to Israel in 1990 and then to Canada in 1996. He represented Canada at the International Mathematical Olympiad, earning gold medals in 2003 and 2004 with a perfect score in 2004. He entered the University of Toronto at age 16 and graduated in just two years.

The Leak That Preceded the Ceremony

The official ceremony was preceded by an unusual leak. On July 13, someone querying the ICM 2026 official schedule API discovered that entries marked “HIDDEN” in the website’s database were being returned without filtering to the front end. Four lecture records labeled “HIDDEN Fields Medal Lecture” were exposed, each with a name attached. The discovery went viral on Chinese-language platforms within hours, and prediction markets on Polymarket pushed the probability of all four names being confirmed above 98 percent. The IMU neither confirmed nor denied the leaked list before the official ceremony.

What’s Next

The 2026 Fields Medals represent more than individual achievement — they signal a generational shift in mathematics. Each recipient resolved problems that had defined entire subfields for decades, and their methods are expected to open new avenues of research. The four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture remains open, as do higher levels of the conjectural tower in harmonic analysis. Mathematicians will now build on the tools Wang, Deng, Pardon, and Tsimerman have provided.

As Larry Guth of MIT, Wang’s doctoral advisor, said of the Kakeya proof: “All these problems that mathematicians dreamed about someday solving, they all look approachable now.”