Photo courtesy of NYU University.
NYU Professor Hong Wang makes history as the third woman and first Chinese woman to be awarded the Fields Medal in 2026.
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years during the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing research advancement and for the promise of future achievement.
Wang was recognized for her contributions to Fourier restriction, Falconer’s conjecture, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya conjecture.
After two years as a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Wang’s first faculty position was here at the UCLA Mathematics Department as an assistant professor from 2021 to 2023.
She moved to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU), transitioning from an associate professor to a full professor in 2025. In the same year, she was also named a permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France. This past April, NYU awarded Wang an endowed professorship known as the Silver Professor of Mathematics.
Read the announcement here.