Meet the only three women to win the Fields Medal in 90 years

Maryam Mirzakhani

Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. Photo courtesy of Stanford University

Mirzakhani became the first woman and the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal in 2014 at age 37 while serving as a mathematics professor at Stanford University.

Established in 1936, the Fields Medal, often called the "Nobel Prize of mathematics," is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) to up to four mathematicians under 40, recognizing both major achievements and future promise. Until 2014, all 52 recipients had been men.

"This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani said in a statement at the time. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years."

The IMU recognized her for groundbreaking work on the geometry and dynamics of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. Her research focused on the properties and symmetries of curved surfaces, including spheres and doughnut-shaped forms. Although highly theoretical, her work also found applications in physics and quantum field theory.

Born in Tehran on May 3, 1977, Mirzakhani initially dreamed of becoming a writer before discovering a passion for mathematics in high school. She won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world's most prestigious mathematics competition for high school students, in 1994 and 1995, earning a perfect score in her second appearance.

She received a bachelor's degree from Sharif University of Technology in Iran in 1999 before completing a PhD at Harvard University in the U.S. After teaching at Princeton University, she joined Stanford in 2008.

In a 2014 interview with Quanta Magazine, Mirzakhani described herself as a "slow" mathematician who preferred pursuing difficult problems.

"You have to ignore low-hanging fruit, which is a little tricky," she said. "I’m not sure if it’s the best way of doing things, actually — you’re torturing yourself along the way."

While traveling to the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Seoul, South Korea, where she received the medal, Mirzakhani was privately battling cancer.

The disease later returned, and she died on July 17, 2017, at age 40. She continued working until shortly before her death and was survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and their daughter, Anahita.

Maryna Viazovska

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska. Photo courtesy of IMU

Ukrainian mathematician Viazovska became the second woman to receive the Fields Medal on July 5, 2022, at age 37 during a ceremony at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.

"I feel sad that I’m only the second woman," Viazovska said in a statement. "But why is that? I don’t know. I hope it will change in the future."

A specialist in number theory, she was honored for solving the sphere-packing problem in eight and 24 dimensions, determining the most efficient way to arrange spheres in those spaces. The problem had remained unsolved for more than 400 years.

Mathematician Henry Cohn, who delivered the official ICM lecture celebrating her work, said Viazovska "manages to do things that are completely non-obvious that lots of people tried and failed to do," adding that she achieves those breakthroughs by "uncovering very simple, natural, profound structures, things that nobody expected and that nobody else had been able to find."

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Viazovska developed an interest in mathematics at an early age.

"I've liked mathematics since my schooldays," she said in a 2022 interview with the Swiss research institute École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). "It always seemed like the most straightforward subject."

She earned her undergraduate degree from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, completed a master's degree in Germany, and received a PhD from the University of Bonn in 2013. She later joined EPFL, becoming a full professor at age 33.

"Studying pure mathematics is bit like reading a book with illustrations," she said in another 2022 interview with EPFL. "The images are linked to the text, but they don’t match the written word exactly."

She said solving mathematical problems felt like "doing a jigsaw puzzle," while abstract ideas helped her connect concepts and identify practical applications.

Hong Wang

Chinese mathematician Hong Wang. Photo courtesy of IHES

Wang became the third woman among the 68 people to win the Fields Medal since its inception when she received the honor at the ICM in Philadelphia, U.S., on July 23.

The 35-year-old mathematician, who was born in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and now holds professorships in both France and the U.S., was recognized for work that helped solve the Kakeya conjecture, a problem that had challenged mathematicians for more than a century.

Originally proposed in 1917 by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya, the conjecture asks a deceptively simple question about the smallest possible space needed to rotate a line segment through every direction. "In 1917, Kakeya asked a very simple question: if you rotate a pencil so as to turn it completely around, what is the smallest area it sweeps out?" Wang told AFP.

Working with colleague Josh Zahl, she solved the problem by studying what happens when the rotating pencil is considered in three-dimensional space rather than on a flat surface. "If this conjecture fascinates people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon shows up naturally in problems from very different fields," Wang said.

At the same ceremony, fellow Chinese mathematician Yu Deng also received a Fields Medal for work on partial differential equations that connected fundamental laws of physics with equations describing gases and fluids, addressing a question first posed by German mathematician David Hilbert more than a century ago.

Together, Wang and Deng became the first Chinese nationals to win the Fields Medal. Two other ethnic Chinese mathematicians, Shing-Tung Yau in 1982 and Terence Tao in 2006, had previously received the award, but neither held Chinese citizenship at the time, according to the South China Morning Post.

Shing-Tung Yau said Wang's and Deng's achievements could inspire more young people, particularly women, to pursue mathematics.

"I think many youngsters will feel that they can do it also, especially for women students," Yau told CGTN. "Because many Chinese families believed that women are not quite appropriate to study math. But now, if they see that a great Chinese woman achieves the highest honor in the subject, they may feel very good to see their daughters get into math."

Born in 1991, Wang entered Peking University at age 16, initially enrolling in the School of Earth and Space Sciences before transferring to its mathematics program a year later.

She earned a bachelor's degree in 2011 before moving to France, where she completed an engineering degree at École Polytechnique and a master's degree in mathematics at Paris-Sud University.

She later received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Larry Guth in 2019. After postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, she joined the University of California, Los Angeles, before becoming a professor at New York University's Courant Institute and a permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France.

Her proof on the Kayka conjecture triggered a succession of prizes for Wang: the Salem Prize, the Ostrowski Prize, and the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians’ Gold Medal of Mathematics in 2025; the Antonio Ambrosetti Medal, Sadosky Prize, Clay Research Award, and New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in the first half of 2026; and finally a 2026 Fields Medal.

Wang said in a interview with Quanta Magazine that at the moment she does not want to get too invested in solving any particular problem. Although her success has made her increasingly well known in China and the international mathematics community, she said she still worried about falling behind and believed she needed to work harder than her colleagues to match their achievements.

"I always wish that I could come back to that time when I just feel like I had infinite time to read," she said. "I think that time was really nice."