MIT alumni Yu Deng and Hong Wang among 2026 Fields Medal winners

MIT alumni Yu Deng '11 and Hong Wang PhD '19 were among four mathematicians awarded Fields Medals on July 23 at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians, MIT News reported. The other honorees were John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman. The Fields Medal is awarded once every four years at the congress and is regarded as one of the highest honors in mathematics. Deng, who earned a BS in mathematics at MIT in 2011 and was a Putnam Fellow in 2010, was cited for work in partial differential equations, including rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics. He is a professor at the University of Chicago. Wang received her PhD at MIT in 2019 under Larry Guth PhD '05. She was cited for work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including multiscale and decoupling techniques applied to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and for major advances such as the solution of the Kakeya problem in three dimensions with Joshua Zahl. Wang is a Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University and a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, and is the third woman ever to win a Fields Medal.