Fields Medal 2026

Four mathematicians were awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) on July 23, 2026, in Philadelphia: **Hong Wang** (NYU / IHES), **Yu Deng** (University of Chicago), **John Pardon** (Stony Brook University), and **Jacob Tsimerman** (University of Toronto). All were under 40 years old, the prize's eligibility requirement. Sources: Simons Foundation, Quanta Magazine.

The Fields Medal is the highest honour in mathematics, often described as the 'Nobel Prize of maths,' though it is awarded only every four years, not annually, and only to mathematicians under 40. It was established in 1936 and is awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Up to four medals are given per edition. Each carries a cash award of CAD 15,000. Sources: Simons Foundation.

Hong Wang is a Chinese-born mathematician and Associate Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). She won the 2026 Fields Medal for proving the **three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture**, a problem open for over a century, together with Joshua Zahl of the University of British Columbia. She is also the **third woman ever** to receive the Fields Medal in the award's 90-year history. Her research spans harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. Sources: NYU, Quanta Magazine, Simons Foundation.

The Kakeya conjecture asks about the minimum possible 'size' (fractal dimension) of a set in n-dimensional space through which a unit needle can be rotated in every possible direction. The conjecture states that any such 'Kakeya set' must have the maximum fractal dimension, equal to n, the dimension of the surrounding space. In February 2025, Hong Wang and Joshua Zahl (UBC) posted a proof that every Kakeya set in **three-dimensional space** must have Hausdorff and Minkowski dimension exactly 3. Fields Medal laureate Terence Tao (2006) described the proof as a landmark 21st-century mathematical achievement. Sources: Quanta Magazine, IAS, UBC Math.

Yu Deng (邓煜), age 37, is a Chinese-born mathematician and Professor at the University of Chicago. He won the 2026 Fields Medal for breakthrough work in partial differential equations, including a rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere gas dynamics, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear dispersive systems including the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. He was a gold medalist at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad and was admitted directly to Peking University. Sources: Simons Foundation, Quanta Magazine.

John Pardon is an American mathematician and Professor at Stony Brook University (New York). He won the 2026 Fields Medal for major breakthroughs in symplectic and contact geometry, with applications touching theoretical physics and string theory. He was valedictorian of Princeton's class of 2011 and received his PhD from Stanford. Sources: Stony Brook University, Simons Foundation.

Jacob Tsimerman, age 38, is an Israeli-Canadian mathematician and Professor at the University of Toronto. He won the 2026 Fields Medal for recasting o-minimality as a core tool in complex algebraic and arithmetic geometry, and for proving the Griffiths conjecture and the André-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties. He is the first Fields medallist to have built his career primarily in Canada. Sources: Simons Foundation, Quanta Magazine.

The International Congress of Mathematicians 2026 (ICM 2026) is held at the **Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, USA**, from **July 23 to July 30, 2026**. The Fields Medals were announced at the opening ceremony on the morning of July 23. The ICM is organised every four years by the International Mathematical Union and is the world's largest conference in mathematics. Sources: Simons Foundation, EurekAlert.

No. Hong Wang is the **third woman ever** to win the Fields Medal, in the award's 90-year history. The first was **Maryam Mirzakhani** (Iran/USA, Stanford) in 2014, for her work on the dynamics of Riemann surfaces. The second was **Maryna Viazovska** (Ukraine, EPFL) in 2022, for proving the optimal sphere-packing solution in 8 dimensions. Sources: Simons Foundation, Quanta Magazine.

Four Fields Medals were awarded at ICM 2026, the standard maximum set by the prize's rules: Hong Wang (NYU), Yu Deng (University of Chicago), John Pardon (Stony Brook), and Jacob Tsimerman (University of Toronto). The award committee can give between two and four medals per edition. Sources: Simons Foundation.

Several historic firsts mark the 2026 edition: (1) **Two mathematicians of Chinese descent won simultaneously**, Hong Wang and Yu Deng, a first in the prize's history; (2) Hong Wang is **only the third woman ever** to win the Fields Medal; (3) Three of the four winners, Wang, Pardon, and Tsimerman, are Princeton University alumni, highlighted by Princeton in its own press release; (4) Jacob Tsimerman is the first Fields medallist to have spent his career primarily in Canada. Sources: Simons Foundation, Princeton University, Nature.