2026 Fields Medals Awarded to Four of World’s Top Mathematicians

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By Yen Duong and Thomas Sumner<br>July 23, 2026

Every four years at its International Congress of Mathematicians, the International Mathematical Union recognizes exceptional mathematicians. Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation; Source: IMU

During today’s opening ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) announced the recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals.

This year’s prizes went to four of the world’s top mathematicians: Chinese mathematician Yu Deng of the University of Chicago; American mathematician John Pardon of Stony Brook University in New York; Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto; and Chinese mathematician Hong Wang of New York University and France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES).

The Fields Medal is often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics due to its prestige. Awarded every four years to two to four mathematicians under the age of 40, the medal recognizes outstanding mathematical achievement in existing work and the promise of future achievement.

Each winner receives 15,000 Canadian dollars (approximately $10,600) and a gold medal bearing the visage of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

“The four medalists exemplify the depth, originality and vitality of contemporary mathematics, and we are delighted to celebrate their achievements at the International Congress of Mathematicians,” says Hiraku Nakajima, president of the IMU.

Additional Prizes Awarded

During the ceremony, the IMU also announced the winners of other top prizes in mathematics. Full citations for these prizes are available on the IMU website.

Shayan Oveis Gharan of the University of Washington received the Abacus Medal for mathematical contributions to computer science. Oveis Gharan is a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Computer Science.

Graeme Segal of the University of Oxford won the Chern Medal for outstanding lifetime achievement in mathematics.

The Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize was awarded to Yurii Nesterov of Belgium’s University of Louvain for mathematical contributions with significant applied applications.

Hannah Fry of the University of Cambridge was honored with the Leelavati Prize for public outreach.

About the Fields Medalists

Yu Deng

Deng was cited “for his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.”

He derived one of the most central equations in kinetic theory and fluid dynamics — the Boltzmann equation — from the mathematics of colliding hard spheres. His work is a leap forward in a centuries-long quest by mathematicians and physicists to derive the basic laws of physics from first principles — one of the famous 23 problems put forth by mathematician David Hilbert at the 1900 ICM.

Deng is a researcher with the Simons Collaboration on Wave Turbulence and a recipient of the foundation’s travel support for mathematicians.

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Fields medalist Yu Deng. Simons Foundation

John Pardon

Pardon was cited for “his achievements in symplectic geometry, including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of Liouville manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory.”

Pardon determined how to count curves on specific shapes in the field of symplectic geometry, proving the 20-year-old MNOP conjecture, which posited that two different ways of counting curves were in fact the same. Those specific shapes, called Calabi–Yau 3-folds, are thought to model our universe in superstring theory. Pardon’s work has implications for representation theory, symplectic topology and quantum physics.

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Fields medalist John Pardon. Simons Foundation

Jacob Tsimerman

Tsimerman was cited “for his role in the vast extension of the scope of o-minimal techniques within arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, including the proof of Griffiths’ conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps.”

He started by attacking big problems in number theory, using algebraic geometry to see how shapes could reveal properties of numbers. He then imported a concept known as o-minimality — a logical framework used to “tame” wild mathematical structures — from one of the most abstract fields in mathematics, model theory, into algebraic geometry, with remarkable results. In...