The 2026 Fields Medals, among the highest honors in mathematics, were given to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang. The prize is presented every four years to researchers under age 40 for major advances in the field. Wang is the third woman to receive the award in its 90-year history, following recipients in 2014 and 2022. She and Deng are the first Chinese nationals honored since 1982. Deng, born in 1989 in Henan province and raised in Shenzhen, earned a gold medal at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad and later became a Putnam Fellow at MIT. He completed his doctorate at Princeton in 2015 and has held positions at New York University and the University of Southern California before joining the University of Chicago in 2024. His research resolved part of one of David Hilbert’s 1900 problems, linking observable physical phenomena such as fluid flow to underlying particle interactions. Pardon, also born in 1989, solved a long-standing question on knot distortion as an undergraduate at Princeton. He earned his doctorate at Stanford in 2015 and has served as a professor at Princeton and the Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics. His work in symplectic geometry proved a 20-year-old conjecture on counting curves in Calabi-Yau shapes and introduced virtual foundation cycles. Wang, born in 1991 in Guangxi, entered Peking University at 16 and later studied in France and at MIT. She held posts at the Institute for Advanced Study and UCLA before becoming a professor at NYU in 2025. She and a collaborator solved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, determining the minimal area needed to rotate a needle through all directions in space. Tsimerman, born in 1988 in Russia and later based in Canada, won multiple Olympiad medals and completed his doctorate at Princeton in 2011. He is now a professor at the University of Toronto. His contributions connect number theory and algebraic geometry, including a proof of Griffith’s conjecture using tools from mathematical logic. On the day of the announcement, he stated he would join OpenAI’s Safety Research group.
