On July 23, the Fields Medal, known as the "Nobel Prize" in mathematics, was officially announced. The four winners are John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Chinese mathematicians Yu Deng and Hong Wang.
On the 25th, The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Wang Hong was the third woman to receive this award. Her reason for winning was her solution to the three-dimensional Sugai conjecture problem.
According to Kyodo News, Wang Hong was awarded the prize for completing the proof of the "Kagami Conjecture" proposed by Japanese mathematician Kagami Sōichi in three-dimensional space. This long-standing problem involves investigating whether the mathematical dimension must be 3 when a needle rotates in three-dimensional space, allowing the swept area to be arbitrarily small.
Wang Hong proved that "it will not be less than 3". This achievement reveals the limit to which information can be compressed, and it can also be applied to the analysis of waveform overlap using "Fourier analysis". This further strengthens the theoretical foundation of technologies such as CT, MRI examinations, and speech recognition.
After the previous results were announced, on the 23rd local time, French President Macron personally called Wang Hong to congratulate her.
Chinese mathematicians Deng Yu and Wang Hong were both listed on the list. This is the first time a Chinese mathematician has received the Fields Medal.
The arrival of this critical point is the result of a combination of three factors: national investment, improvement in the academic ecosystem, and the maturation of talent pipelines. It is not an accidental “genius breakthrough,” but the outcome of a systematic project that has lasted for twenty years, finally bearing fruit in 2026.
Wang Hong, born in Guilin, Guangxi in 1991, was admitted to the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University at the age of 16. One year later, she transferred to the School of Mathematical Sciences.
In February 2025, she published a 127-page paper with Joshua Zahl, announcing the resolution of the century-old problem of “the smallest area that a needle can sweep across in three-dimensional space” through research on the Three-Dimensional Huggle Conjecture. Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, described this achievement as “a once-in-a-century breakthrough.”
She is currently a tenured professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France. She is the first Chinese and Asian person to serve as a tenured professor at this institution. Among the previous 13 tenured professors of mathematics at IHES, 8 have won the Fields Medal.
