Around 9:00 PM Beijing time on July 23, 2026 (9:00 AM Philadelphia time), this year’s International Congress of Mathematicians will kick off, and the quadrennial Fields Medal will be announced simultaneously.
The Fields Medal is known as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics,” awarded to outstanding contributors in the field of mathematics who are under 40 years old that year. With its strict age limit, the Fields Medal is also seen as a key benchmark for measuring the top level of basic mathematical research in different countries.
The award was proposed by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, with 2 to 4 recipients each time. Each winner receives a prize of 15,000 Canadian dollars (about 72,179 RMB), funded by the surplus from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto a century ago, along with Fields’ personal inheritance.
Fields was born on May 14, 1863, into an ordinary family in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He tragically lost both parents in his youth, and academic research became his emotional anchor. In 1884, he graduated with a gold medal in mathematics from the University of Toronto, earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1887, and then became a mathematics professor at Allegheny College in the U.S.
His main focus was algebraic function theory, and in 1906, he successfully proved the Riemann–Roch theorem. This theorem spurred the development of modern core branches of mathematics like characteristic classes and K-theory, and it has broad applications in fields such as arithmetic geometry and graph theory.
In 1924, Fields organized the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto. This was the first ICM held outside Europe, greatly boosting the development of mathematics in North America. At that time, he proposed using the congress’s surplus funds to establish an international mathematics award.
Before his death on August 9, 1932, Fields added his personal inheritance to the award fund. The International Congress of Mathematicians then officially established the award, which was first presented at the 1936 ICM in Oslo, Norway, with a fixed rule of being awarded every four years.
Similar to the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal attracts huge attention from the industry. This is not only because it can measure the level of basic scientific research in different countries, but also because its winning achievements are the theoretical foundations for underlying technologies like 5G communications and artificial intelligence, indirectly supporting modern digital life scenarios such as smartphones and the internet.
The main characteristics of past winners: the average age at the time of the award is about 37; among the over 90 previous recipients, the vast majority come from top universities in Europe and America, especially the U.S. and France; nearly 80% of winners have studied or taught at institutions like Princeton University, Harvard University, or the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Meanwhile, before 2026, only two women had ever won the award: Maryna Viazovska from Ukraine and Maryam Mirzakhani from Iran.
It’s worth noting that only two mathematicians of Chinese descent have won the Fields Medal so far. They are Shing-Tung Yau, who was born in Shantou, Guangdong, grew up in Hong Kong, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Terence Tao, who was born in Australia and grew up in Adelaide, Australia’s fifth-largest city.
A recent article from the public account “The Intellectual” reported that earlier this month, hidden fields were found in the front-end code of the International Congress of Mathematicians website. This might mean the list of this year’s Fields Medal winners was accidentally leaked early. They are Wang Hong, Deng Yu, Jacob Tsimerman, and John Pardon.
If the “leaked information” is true, this year will see two mathematicians who received their undergraduate education in mainland China win the award simultaneously, marking a world-class breakthrough for China’s homegrown mathematics training system. The International Mathematical Union and the congress organizers have not yet responded to this, but prediction markets show the probability of these four winning has risen to over 98%.
Public information shows that Wang Hong and Deng Yu are both alumni of the 2007 class at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University. Wang Hong was born in 1991 in Guilin, Guangxi, focuses mainly on Fourier analysis research, and is currently a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France. Together with her collaborator, she published a 127-page paper that cracked the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem that has troubled mathematicians for over a century, achieving a major breakthrough in the field of harmonic analysis.
Deng Yu, born in 1989 in Shenzhen, represented China and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He later transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for further study, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and became a professor at the University of Chicago at the age of 35. He creatively connected the complete logical chain from Newton’s particle system to the Boltzmann equation, providing key theoretical support for understanding “irregular singular solutions” in fluid phenomena like weather forecasting and aircraft turbulence.
Jacob Tsimerman was born in 1988 in Kazan, then part of the Soviet Union. He moved to Canada with his family in 1996, settled there, entered the University of Toronto at 16, and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011. His achievements include major breakthroughs at the intersection of transcendental theory, analytic number theory, and arithmetic geometry, as well as a complete proof of the André–Oort conjecture, which had baffled the academic community for nearly 40 years.
John Pardon was born in 1989 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, into a highly educated family. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he is now a professor in the mathematics department. He has achieved several milestone breakthroughs in the fields of geometric topology and symplectic geometry.