The 2026 Fields Medal, one of the world’s most prestigious mathematics prizes, has just been awarded to four pioneering young researchers — including mathematician Hong Wang, the third woman ever to win the prize in the 90 years since the award was established.

The Fields Medal is an award presented every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40 for their outstanding discoveries. The International Mathematical Union announced Thursday (July 23) that Wang, a professor at New York University, is among the four recipients of the 2026 medal for her work on a decades-old conjecture about how needles move in 3D spaces. .

The 2026 Fields Medal winners also include Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, who was recognized for connecting microscopic and macroscopic descriptions of gases; John Pardon of Stony Brook University, whose work solved major problems in topology and geometry; and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto, who developed powerful new techniques in algebraic geometry that have advanced progress on longstanding mathematical puzzles.

Wang joins an exceptionally small group of women to receive the Fields Medal. Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani __was the first, in 2014, followed by Ukrainian mathematician __Maryna Viazovska in 2022. No woman received the award at all in the nearly 80 years before Mirzakhani's win.

Wang was recognized for her work on the Kakeya conjecture, a problem that asks how little space is needed to rotate a needle so that it points in every possible direction in three dimensions. Mathematicians had chased a solution for roughly 50 years.

Related stories

• Nobel Prize-winning physicist and team use Claude AI to solve decades-old math puzzle
• AI just verified a proof that earned one of math's most prestigious prizes. Math will never be the same
• Science history: Sophie Germain, first woman to win France's prestigious 'Grand Mathematics Prize' is snubbed when tickets to award ceremony are 'lost in the mail' — Jan. 9, 1816

Working with collaborator Joshua Zahl, Wang showed that if you track every direction the needle could point as a bundle of thin tubes, there's a precise trade-off between how thin those tubes are and how much total space they must occupy. Solving the puzzle required tools from harmonic analysis, a field that studies how complex shapes and signals can be broken down into simpler pieces.

The proof wasn't a triumphant moment for Wang, at least not right away. She and Zahl spent months checking their 127-page proof before making it public — and even then, Wang worried that their argument might be unclear. The paper nonetheless earned comparisons to a "once-in-a-century" result and set off a string of honors culminating in the Fields Medal, according to Quanta Magazine.

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

The 2026 Fields Medals were presented during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. The first Fields Medal was awarded in 1936. So far, 65 men have received the award.

Olivia Maule is a science journalist whose beats include space, biotechnology and the environment. She holds a B.A. in biology and a B.S. in anthropology from the University of Florida and completed a master's degree in science communication at U.C. Santa Cruz. A 2025 AAAS Mass Media Fellow, she wrote stories and produced videos during a summer at El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico's largest newspaper, and has written for Eos, Mongabay, Science magazine and Stanford Report. Olivia is a native Spanish and English speaker.