The 2026 Fields Medals were awarded to four mathematicians on July 23, 2026, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) held in Philadelphia, United States. This year’s laureates are Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang. Wang is only the third woman in the award’s 90-year history to receive the honour. Often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the Fields Medal is among the most prestigious international awards in the mathematical sciences.
What Is the Fields Medal?
The Fields Medal was established in 1932 through the efforts of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields and was first awarded in 1936 at the ICM in Oslo, Norway. Since 1950, it has been awarded every four years at the ICM to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40 for outstanding mathematical achievement and the promise of future discoveries.
The medal is made of gold and bears the image of Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, along with a Latin inscription that translates to “To pass beyond one’s understanding and take possession of the world.” Each recipient receives a cash prize of 15,000 Canadian Dollars (CAD). The International Mathematical Union (IMU) administers the selection process.
Unlike the Nobel Prize, which has no category for mathematics, the Fields Medal fills that gap and is widely regarded as the highest international honour a mathematician can receive. As of 2026, a total of 68 mathematicians have received the medal. The award carries a strict age limit, and no medal is awarded to anyone over 40.
The Four Laureates of 2026
The 2026 class of Fields Medal winners represents a diverse range of mathematical fields, from partial differential equations to symplectic geometry and number theory. Two of the four winners, Yu Deng and Hong Wang, were born in China and are the first Chinese-born winners of the medal since 1982.
Yu Deng
Yu Deng, 37, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Fields Medal for his contributions to partial differential equations (PDEs) and mathematical physics. Deng cracked a key piece of Hilbert’s Sixth Problem, one of a famous set of 23 problems posed by German mathematician David Hilbert at the 1900 ICM. The specific challenge Deng solved was proving the mathematical link between the equations governing individual gas particles (Newtonian mechanics) and the Boltzmann equation, which describes gas behaviour at a larger scale. This 125-year-old problem had resisted resolution for over a century. Deng completed this work alongside collaborators Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma. In his youth, Deng won a gold medal for China at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2006.
John Pardon
John Pardon, 37, is a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University in New York. He was recognized for his achievements in symplectic geometry, a branch of mathematics that originated in the study of phase space in physics. Pardon has made landmark contributions across multiple areas including knot theory, topology, and enumerative algebraic geometry. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, he solved a major open problem in knot theory related to Gromov’s distortion conjecture. His dissertation on the “virtual cycle problem” provided a rigorous foundation for symplectic geometry, and his proof of the MNOP conjecture in 2023, which relates Gromov-Witten invariants to Donaldson-Thomas invariants in curve counting, is considered one of the biggest results in enumerative algebraic geometry in two decades.
Jacob Tsimerman
Jacob Tsimerman, 38, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, making him the first scholar based at a Canadian institution to win the Fields Medal. He was honoured for his role in proving the André-Oort conjecture, a deep problem in number theory and algebraic geometry that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The conjecture concerns highly special points within geometric spaces and the hidden structures that cause them to appear. Tsimerman completed his PhD at Princeton University under the supervision of Peter Sarnak. He won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad for Canada, including a perfect score in 2004. He was also awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2015.
Hong Wang
Hong Wang, 35, is a professor of mathematics at New York University and the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) in France. She was awarded the Fields Medal for proving the three-dimensional Kakeya set conjecture, a problem at the intersection of harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and partial differential equations that had remained open for decades. The Kakeya conjecture asks whether a set of line segments pointing in every direction in three-dimensional space must itself occupy the full three dimensions. Wang and her collaborator Joshua Zahl produced a 127-page proof in early 2025. The result is considered a “once in a century” proof and has deep implications for Fourier analysis and wave phenomena. Before this breakthrough, Wang also contributed to the proof of the local smoothing conjecture and the Furstenberg set conjecture. Born in Guilin, China, she studied at Peking University and earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A Historic Achievement: Third Woman to Win the Fields
Hong Wang’s victory places her in an exclusive group. She is only the third woman to ever win the Fields Medal in its 90-year history.
The first was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician, who won the medal in 2014 for her work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces. She remains the only Iranian and the first woman to win the award. The second was Maryna Viazovska, a Ukrainian mathematician, who won in 2022 for solving the sphere-packing problem in eight and twenty four dimensions. Wang is also the first Chinese woman to receive the Fields Medal.
This milestone underscores the growing, though still limited, representation of women in the highest levels of mathematics. Of the 68 Fields Medals awarded since 1936, only three have gone to women.
Key Takeaways
- The 2026 Fields Medals were awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang at the ICM 2026 in Philadelphia on July 23, 2026.
- The Fields Medal was established in 1932 and first awarded in 1936. It is given every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40.
- The medal features the image of Archimedes and carries a cash prize of 15,000 CAD.
- Hong Wang became the third woman to win the Fields Medal, after Maryam Mirzakhani (2014) and Maryna Viazovska (2022).
- Yu Deng solved a key part of Hilbert’s Sixth Problem, a 125-year-old mathematical challenge posed by David Hilbert.
- Jacob Tsimerman became the first scholar based at a Canadian institution to win the award, recognized for proving the André-Oort conjecture.
