Chinese mathematicians win Fields Medals for first time

Two Chinese mathematicians have won the Fields Medal for the first time, a milestone that drew celebration and debate in China as the world’s top mathematics prize was awarded Thursday in Philadelphia.

Hong Wang and Yu Deng received the medal alongside American mathematician John Pardon and Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman at the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Each winner receives a gold medal and 15,000 Canadian dollars, about $10,500 to $11,000.

The Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under age 40. This year’s awards marked the first time two Chinese scholars won the prize simultaneously. Wang, 35, is the first Chinese woman to receive the honor and only the third woman to win in the medal’s 90-year history.

“All four mathematicians have made tremendous contributions to their respective fields,” Ulrike Tillmann, vice president and incoming president of the International Mathematical Union, told NPR. “It’s also wonderful to see another woman winning the Medal. We should have the feeling that it has become a normal thing that women contribute to their fields at the highest level, including the Fields Medal.”

Wang, originally from Guilin in southern China, works at New York University and France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. She was recognized for work with University of British Columbia mathematician Joshua Zahl on the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, a problem that traces back to a 1917 question from Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya: If a pencil is rotated all the way around, what is the smallest area it can sweep out?

Wang and Zahl studied the problem as if the pencil were floating in three-dimensional space rather than moving on a flat surface. They published their study last year. The International Mathematical Union said their solution “opened the door for a host of theorems and conjectures in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, geometric measure theory and other fields.”

“If this conjecture fascinates people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon shows up naturally in problems from very different fields,” Wang told AFP.

Deng, 37, is a professor at the University of Chicago. Originally from Shenzhen, he was honored for work connected to a century-old question posed in 1900 by German mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert’s Sixth Problem asks how the behavior of a whole can be calculated from the movement of individual particles. Deng approached the problem by studying the behavior of gases.

The IMU described Deng’s work, including a key paper co-authored with the University of Michigan’s Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma, as “a leap forward in a centuries-long quest by mathematicians and physicists to derive the basic laws of physics from first principles.” Deng said it was a “really great honor to have my name listed after all those great mathematicians I’ve always been admiring.”

Pardon was cited for contributions to topology and geometry, while Tsimerman was praised for extending logical frameworks from abstract mathematics into algebraic geometry.

The awards generated millions of views on Chinese social media, where hashtags including “Fields Medal” and “First Chinese mathematicians to win Fields Medals” spread across platforms such as Weibo and RedNote. “For the Chinese mathematics community, this is a dream we have been hoping to realise for decades,” said Shing-Tung Yau, the first ethnic Chinese Fields medalist.

Some online comments also focused on where Wang and Deng built their careers. Both began higher education at Peking University, but trained and now work outside China. NPR reported that Deng transferred to MIT after two years in Beijing and completed a Ph.D. at Princeton, while Wang pursued postgraduate study in France before finishing her mathematics Ph.D. at MIT.

The winners’ names were also revealed prematurely after a vulnerability on the International Congress of Mathematicians website allowed coders to find them before the official ceremony, NPR reported.