Four mathematicians — Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang — have been announced by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) as the recipients of the 2026 Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics for researchers under 40.
Yu Deng and John Pardon
Yu Deng of the University of Chicago received the medal for his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of Boltzmann equations from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear scattering systems, and a probabilistic approach to nonlinear Schrodinger dynamics.
John Pardon of Stony Brook University received the medal for achievements in symplectic geometry including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories for certain cavity pans and computational holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on cavity 3-pans and knot theory.
Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang
Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto for his contributions to the reconstruction of o-minimality as a fundamental method of complex algebraic arithmetic and geometry, and his role in proving many central conjectures including the Griffiths conjecture on the algebraicity of images of maps of the period, and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel's modular manifold.
Finally, Hong Wang of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques for his contributions to harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including the application of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for plane wave equations, and major advances in Fourier constraints, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions
In terms of status, the Fields Medal is seen as having the same prestige as the Nobel Prize but specifically for the field of mathematics. Unlike the Nobel Prize which is awarded annually, the Fields Medal is awarded every four years. Hong Wang is now the third female recipient in the 90-year history of the Fields Medal.
The maximum age limit of 40 years for recipients was set by its creator John Charles Fields to encourage discoveries by young mathematicians. The Fields Medal can also only be won once in a lifetime. Since its introduction in 1936, 68 have received the medal, which comes with a cash prize of CA$15,000 (~RM 43,510) each.
