2026 Fields Medals go to four young mathematicians
Scientific American · LC · trust 34/100
The 2026 Fields Medals recognize breakthroughs in the math of messy fluids, tangled knots, spinning pencils, and more
The mathematician Hong Wang is one of four recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals, awards often called “math’s Nobel Prize.”
The Fields Medals went to Hong Wang of New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.
In the awards’ 90-year history, Wang is only the third woman to win one, after mathematicians Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska in 2014 and 2022, respectively. Wang and Deng represent the prizes’ only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982.
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The awards, often referred to as math’s Nobel Prizes, are named for John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who led the push for their creation in the 1920s as a way to bring the international math community together. But unlike the Nobels, they are only bestowed every four years and, starting in 1966, only go to researchers who are less than 40 years old.
When Wang rose to speak during a symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., this past February, she opened with a characteristic note of humility. “Thank you for having me; it’s a great honor,” she said. “Especially when I saw the speaker list, I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t speak.’”
But no one in the rapt audience shared Wang’s opinion. At age 34, her work at the interface of two mathematical fields—taking collections of wavelike equations and using them to explore how shapes fill space—had already transformed both subjects. In particular, a 2025 proof of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture that she co-authored with mathematician Joshua Zahl marked a triumphant end to what had been a fervent, field-defining 50-year search.
Hong Wang is a mathematician at New York University and the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) in France. She and a collaborator solved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a major problem.
Now Wang possesses the ultimate qualification for any list of mathematical greats: a Fields Medal.
The Kakeya conjecture is the answer to a mathematical game: swirl your pencil around in the air so that it points in every direction exactly once while also swiveling it through as little space as possible. Wang and Zahl proved a fundamental limit to how small that space can possibly be.
“She solved the ‘holy grail’ problem,” says Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, adding that this is only one of the accomplishments that “has made her a central figure” in the area. Wang’s Fields Medal, he says, “is well deserved.”
Wang remembers being excited when Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a Fields medal in 2014. But like it was for the late Mirzakhani , who was a reticent public figure, this aspect of the achievement is somewhat secondary to Wang. “I didn’t think too much about it,” she says.
Informed quietly in January that he’d won a Fields medal, Deng fled his University of Chicago office, spending the next few days walking the shores of Lake Michigan to calm his nerves. But then he went back to work. “You just act as if nothing happened,” he says.
In 2024 and 2025 he and his co-authors released a series of gargantuan papers that amounted to an unprecedented achievement in math and physics. The motion of fluids has always seemed contradictory . Microscopically, a fluid is a chaotic jumble of molecules bouncing off one another like billiard balls. But macroscopically, it follows laws of motion as if it was one continuous whole.
Yu Deng is a mathematician at the University of Chicago. He and collaborators explained why the math of how fluids move looks so different at the microscopic scale.
Mathematicians had tried—and largely failed—for more than a century to formally reconcile how fluids could behave in these two distinct ways. Deng’s award is for changing that. He and his collaborators proved that the equations that describe fluids on different scales are actually one and the same.
“It’s a truly spectacular, singular result,” says Scott Armstrong, a mathematician at N.Y.U. It’s hard to imagine a more deserving recipient, Armstrong adds, and he expects Deng’s mathematical run to continue. “It would have been a disaster had he not won.”
With today’s awards, Deng and Wang have now tripled the total number of Chinese-born Fields Medalists. This reflects China’s decades of investment in math education, which has led to a fresh crop of talented young mathematicians populating the top universities. “I’m working mostly just as myself,” Deng says, “but I’m also happy that I’m one of the first of this new generation to get this recognition.”
If a Fields Medal is an award for the mathematically precocious, it’s hard to imagine a better fit than Pardon. In 2010 he was just a 21-year-old undergraduate at Princeton University when his work in knot theory ensured the entire math world learned his name.
John Pardon is a mathematician specializing in geometry and topology at Stony Brook University. He solved a major conjecture about knots as a Princeton University undergraduate at age 21.
Knot theory is about all the different ways a piece of string can be tied up, with its two loose strands glued together after the tying. These myriad forms…
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