The 2026 Fields Medals, considered the highest honor in mathematics, were announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) on the evening of 23/7. This year's recipients are Yu Deng, Jacob Tsinerman, John Pardon, and Hong Wang.
This marks a historic first, with two mathematicians of Chinese origin receiving the award concurrently. It is also the third time a woman has been honored with the medal. All four laureates are currently based in North America.
Yu Deng, 37, a professor at the University of Chicago, USA, received the 2026 Fields Medal for his contributions to partial differential equations. His work includes the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for dilute gases, the derivation of wave dynamics from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.
During high school, Deng was directly admitted to Peking University after winning a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2006). He later moved to the USA, earning his bachelor's degree at MIT and his doctoral degree at Princeton University.
John Pardon, born in 1989, a professor at Stony Brook University, USA, was recognized for his achievements in symplectic geometry. These include new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, the Fukaya category of certain manifolds, and the counting of holomorphic curves. He also contributed to other areas of geometry and topology, such as group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory.
John Pardon previously won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics from 2005 to 2007. He graduated as valedictorian from Stony Brook University and received his doctoral degree from Stanford University.
Jacob Tsinerman, born in 1988, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the first Canadian to win a Fields Medal.
He contributed to reshaping o-minimality into a fundamental method in complex algebraic geometry and number theory. He also played a role in proving several central conjectures, including the Griffiths conjecture on the algebraicity of images of period maps and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.
Tsinerman won consecutive gold medals at the IMO for two years. He studied mathematics at the University of Toronto and earned his doctoral degree at Princeton University, USA.
Hong Wang, the youngest of the four laureates, was the last to be announced. Born in 1991, she is a professor at New York University, USA.
She received the 2026 Fields Medal for her research in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. Her work includes applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the flat wave equation. She also made significant advancements in the Fourier restriction problem, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.
The third female recipient in the history of the Fields Medal is considered a "prodigy", having been admitted to Peking University (China) at the age of 16. She completed her bachelor's degree in China and earned her doctoral degree at MIT, USA.
The Fields Medal is awarded to a maximum of four mathematicians under the age of 40, once every four years. Each laureate receives a 14-carat gold medal engraved with the image of Archimedes and a prize of 15,000 CAD (approximately 270 million Vietnamese dong).
Khanh Linh
