Four Young Mathematicians Awarded the 2026 Fields Medals

The 2026 Fields Medals — math's highest honor — were awarded to Hong Wang, Yu Deng, John Pardon, and Jacob Tsimerman at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. Wang becomes only the third woman to win in the prize's 90-year history.

The 2026 Fields Medals — widely regarded as mathematics' Nobel Prize — were awarded on July 23 at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia. Four researchers under 40 received the honor for breakthroughs spanning fluid dynamics, knot theory, geometric measure theory, and arithmetic geometry.

Hong Wang (34, NYU and IHES France) becomes only the third woman to receive a Fields Medal in the prize's 90-year history. Her work, alongside collaborator Joshua Zahl, solved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture — a problem about how little space a pencil can occupy while being swiveled to point in every direction. "She solved the 'holy grail' problem," said Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University.

Yu Deng (University of Chicago) was recognized for reconciling the centuries-old disconnect between how fluids behave at microscopic and macroscopic scales. In a 2024–2025 series of papers, Deng and his collaborators proved that the equations governing fluids at different scales are fundamentally the same — a result called "truly spectacular" by colleagues.

John Pardon (Stony Brook University) earned his medal for work in geometry and topology. Pardon first grabbed the math world's attention as a 21-year-old Princeton undergraduate in 2010, when he solved a major conjecture in knot theory — the study of how strings can be tied and untangled.

Jacob Tsimerman (University of Toronto) was honored for recasting o-minimality as a fundamental method in arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, contributing to proofs of major conjectures including the André-Oort conjecture.

Deng and Wang together triple the total number of Chinese-born Fields Medalists — from one (Shing-Tung Yau in 1982) to three. The awards, established in 1936, are given every four years and restricted to mathematicians under age 40.

Sources: Scientific American, Wikipedia