Hong Wang, third woman in 90 years to win math's highest honor, once left the field for architecture
Hong Wang became the third woman in 90 years to receive the Fields Medal, recognized for her contributions to harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. After briefly leaving mathematics for architecture, she returned and completed a groundbreaking proof on the three-dimensional Kakeya problem. Wang and Yu Deng are the first Chinese nationals to be awarded the prestigious medal.
- ▪Wang was awarded the Fields Medal on July 23 in Philadelphia for work including the local smoothing conjecture and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.
- ▪She initially switched to architecture before returning to mathematics, completing her PhD under Larry Guth at MIT and holding positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, UCLA, and NYU.
- ▪Together with Joshua Zahl, Wang posted a 127-page proof in 2025 showing that a three-dimensional Kakeya set can have zero volume while retaining full dimension.
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Hiraku Nakajima, president of the International Mathematical Union and chair of the Fields Medal selection committee, presented the four medals at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on July 23. The other recipients were Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.The union cited Wang's work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.Wang is Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute and, since September 2025, a permanent professor at France's Institut des Hautes Études…
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