On the evening of July 23, 2026, Beijing time, this year’s International Congress of Mathematicians kicked off in Philadelphia, USA, and the once-every-four-years Fields Medal was announced at the same time.
The four winners are Deng Yu and Wang Hong from China, John Pardon from the United States, and Jacob Tsimerman from Canada.
This marks the first time Chinese mathematicians have won two Fields Medals at the same International Congress of Mathematicians—a historic breakthrough for the country.
Before this, only two mathematicians of Chinese descent had won the medal: Shing-Tung Yau, born in Shantou, Guangdong, raised in Hong Kong, and an undergraduate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Terence Tao, born in Australia and raised in Adelaide, the country’s fifth-largest city.
Also worth noting: before Wang Hong, only two women had ever received the award—Maryna Viazovska from Ukraine and Maryam Mirzakhani from Iran.
Public records show that Deng Yu and Wang Hong were both classmates at Peking University’s School of Mathematical Sciences, class of 2007. Deng Yu was born in 1989 in Shenzhen. While attending Shenzhen Senior High School, he represented China and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and became a professor at the University of Chicago at the age of 35.
Deng’s research focuses on nonlinear dispersive equations, wave equations, fluid dynamics, harmonic analysis, probabilistic theories of partial differential equations, and statistical physics. Together with collaborators, he rigorously derived wave kinetic equations and derived the Boltzmann equation from long-term hard sphere dynamics.
In March 2025, Deng was the first author of a paper co-authored with two other scholars, Ma Xiao and Zaher Hani, achieving a historic breakthrough in “Hilbert’s Sixth Problem,” which had remained unsolved for 125 years, having a profound impact on both the math and physics communities.
Deng is also an amateur Go player. In his acceptance speech, he mentioned that the Olympiad and Go are very similar—both require long periods of intense focus and heavy “calculation.”
His classmate, Wang Hong, was born in 1991 in Guilin, Guangxi, and is currently a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France.
Wang has deep expertise in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. Last year, she and her colleagues published a 127-page paper that proved the “Kakeya Conjecture,” a problem that had stumped mathematicians for over a century.
The Kakeya Conjecture, originally proposed by Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya, asks about the minimal measure and dimensional properties of a “Kakeya set” (a set containing a unit line segment in every direction) in n-dimensional space. The proof offers a brand-new foundational analytical framework for signal processing fields like radar and remote sensing.
At just 16, Wang Hong entered Peking University’s School of Earth and Space Sciences in 2007.The following year, she transferred to the School of Mathematical Sciences, where she completed her thesis on “Classical Hodge Theory and Hodge Theory on Metric Spaces.” During this time, she collaborated with Zhang Ruixiang to prove the Sogge local smoothing conjecture for the 2+1 dimensional wave equation.
In 2011, Wang earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Peking University. Three years later, she obtainedan engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a master’s degree from Paris-Sud University. She then earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019, followed by postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She completed her postdoc in 2021 and became an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, that July.
In her acceptance speech today, Wang shared that her parents gave her immense freedom throughout her upbringing.
Pardon was born in 1989 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, into an educated family. He studied at Stanford University for his bachelor’s degree and earned his PhD from Princeton University, where he is now a professor in the math department. He has made multiple milestone breakthroughs in geometric topology and symplectic geometry.
Tsimerman was born in 1988 in Kazan, then part of the Soviet Union. He moved to Canada with his family in 1996, entered the University of Toronto at age 16, and earned his PhD from Princeton University in 2011. His achievements include major advances at the crossroads of transcendence theory, analytic number theory, and arithmetic geometry, as well as a complete proof of the André-Oort Conjecture, which had stumped researchers for nearly 40 years.
The Fields Medal is often called the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics,” awarded to mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions to the field. Proposed by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, the medal is given to 2 to 4 people each time, and each winner receives 15,000 Canadian dollars (approximately 72,179 RMB).
Like the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal draws huge attention because the winning achievements often form the theoretical foundation for underlying technologies like 5G communications and artificial intelligence, indirectly supporting modern digital life—from smartphones to the internet.
Of the more than 90 past winners, the vast majority come from top European and American universities, especially in the US and France. Nearly 80% have studied or taught at institutions like Princeton University, Harvard University, or the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.