Chinese Mathematicians Wang Hong and Deng Yu Both Win Fields Medal, Both Peking University Alumni

Peking University confirmed that on July 23 local time, the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) opened in Philadelphia, United States. At the opening ceremony, the International Mathematical Union officially announced the list of winners of the 21st Fields Medal. Wang Hong and Deng Yu, both members of Peking University's Class of 2007 undergraduate cohort, were both honored — marking the first time that Chinese mathematicians have won two medals in a single edition of the Fields Medal.

The Fields Medal is awarded once every four years, with no more than four recipients each time, to recognize scholars under the age of 40 who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics. It is one of the highest honors in the international mathematical community and is often called "the Nobel Prize of mathematics."

Wang Hong completed her undergraduate studies at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Peking University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree. In 2014 she successively obtained an engineer's diploma from the ecole Polytechnique in Paris and a master's degree from Paris-Saclay University. She then studied under Professor Larry Guth and completed her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After finishing her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in June 2021, she became an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles that July. In July 2023 she joined the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University as an associate professor. Since September 1, 2025, she has served as a permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. In February 2025, Wang Hong, in collaboration with Joshua Zahl, resolved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture — a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for over a century.

Deng Yu began his undergraduate studies at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Peking University before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2015 under Professor Alexandru D. Ionescu. He has served as a postdoctoral researcher at NYU's Courant Institute and as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and is currently a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Together with Ma Xiao and Zaher Hani, Deng Yu resolved the special case of Hilbert's sixth problem, deriving for the first time in a mathematically rigorous way the complete logical chain from microscopic particle systems to the macroscopic Boltzmann equation.