Meet Wang Hong, Chinese math star tipped for 2026 Fields Medal

Her result is being viewed as breakthrough that could have implications for imaging, data processing, cryptography and wireless communication. If Wang, 35, was awarded the medal she would be the first Chinese woman to receive the honour.

Wang drew even more attention in October 2025, when she received two important mathematics honors on the same day: the Salem Prize and the Gold Award of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM).

She shared the Salem Prize with Vesselin Dimitrov for their work on major unsolved questions in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. The annual award recognizes outstanding young mathematicians and is administered by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The U.S. Australian-American mathematician Terence Tao, often called the "Mozart of maths" and chair of the Salem Prize scientific committee, sent his congratulations to the pair at the time.

On the same day, Wang also received the Gold Award of the ICCM Mathematics Award, often referred to as the Chinese "Fields Medal," together with collaborators Deng Yu and Yuan Xinyi, according to Chinese news site 36Kr.

Her Kakeya breakthrough, combined with those honors, has strengthened expectations that she could win the Fields Medal. The prize will be announced in July 2026. Historically, the Salem Prize has often been a sign of future Fields Medal success: since 1968, 10 of 56 Salem Prize winners have later gone on to receive the Fields Medal, including Tao.

The award is presented every four years to mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions to the discipline, with the next ceremony set for this year at the International Congress of Mathematics.

Chinese mathematician Wang Hong, recipient of the 2025 Salem Prize. Photo courtesy of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques

Born in Guilin in southern China, Wang was raised by two middle school teacher parents and showed unusual academic talent from a very young age. By the time she entered primary school, she had already learned first-grade material and skipped straight to the second grade.

She became known for studying ahead on her own, often searching for materials independently and solving difficult problems before discussing them with classmates or teachers.

Wang has said self-study played an important role in her mathematical development. Unlike many top mathematicians, she did not receive systematic training in math competitions and instead relied heavily on books from the library, according to The Standard.

China’s national college entrance examination. She first joined the Department of Geoscience before later switching to mathematics after realizing where her real passion lay.

After graduating in 2011, Wang moved to France, where she studied at École Polytechnique and later earned a master’s degree from the University of Paris-Sud. She then went to the U.S., completing her PhD at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of mathematician Larry Guth.

She later carried out postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before becoming an assistant professor at UCLA in 2021. In 2023, she joined New York University’s Courant Institute as an associate professor, and by 2025 she had been promoted to full professor.

Wang also holds a tenured professorship at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in France, where she became the first woman ever to receive tenure. The post is especially prestigious, as eight of the institute’s previous 13 tenured mathematics professors later won the Fields Medal.

Chinese mathematician Wang Hong. Photo courtesy of Peking University

Her standing in the field rose even further after she and collaborator Joshua Zahl released a 127-page paper proving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. Tao praised the achievement in a social media post, calling it the solution to one of the most sought-after open problems in geometric measure theory.

In addition to Kakeya, Wang has contributed to other major research areas, including the Fourier restriction conjecture and the Falconer distance set conjecture.

Last summer, she gave seminars at major institutions across China, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other leading research centers, drawing large audiences. One of those attending was prominent mathematician Wei Dongyi, sometimes nicknamed "God Wei," who reportedly sat in the front row taking notes and discussing mathematics with her afterward.

At the opening of one of Wang’s lectures at Tsinghua University, noted mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, the first Chinese Fields Medalist and dean of Qiuzhen College, praised her achievements.

"Hong Wang is the greatest and most important Chinese scholar of the younger generation." Yau said.