MIT alumni Yu Deng ’11 and Hong Wang PhD ’19 were among the four young mathematicians awarded Fields Medals on July 23 at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The other two honorees were John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman.
The Fields Medal is awarded once every four years at the ICM, and is regarded as one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive.
Yu Deng received his BS in mathematics at MIT in 2011, and was a Putnam Fellow in 2010. He earned his Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations (PDE), including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics. His first published paper (in Analysis & PDE) was on the latter topic, and stemmed from summer research conducted at MIT on a problem suggested by Gigliola Staffilani. Deng is currently a professor at the University of Chicago.
Hong Wang received her PhD at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Larry Guth PhD ’05. She is awarded the Fields Medal for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and other major advances such as the solution of the Kakeya problem in three dimensions (with Joshua Zahl). As a student in the department, she was a graduate mentor in the Summer Program in Undergraduate Research (SPUR) and, alongside her mentee, was awarded the Hartley Rogers Jr. SPUR Prize, presented to the best student-mentor team. Wang, a Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University and a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, is the third woman ever to win a Fields Medal.
“The achievements of Yu Deng and Hong Wang are truly monumental, and we are all elated that they were awarded Fields Medals,” department head and RSA Professor of Mathematics Michel Goemans says. “Their success is a testimony of the amazing mathematical talent we have at all levels at MIT, and the top-quality education, mentorship, and research opportunities we provide to both our large pool of math majors and our PhD students, during their lifelong mathematical journey.”
Goemans adds, “MIT is a unique and exciting place to learn mathematics, and I am sure we have more future Fields medalists among our students and junior members of the department.”
