Four mathematicians, Yu Deng, Hong Wang, Jacob Tsimerman, and John Pardon, have bagged the prestigious 2026 Fields Medals for their work in algebraic geometry and partial differential equations.

The winners of this year’s Fields Medals were announced on Thursday during the International Congress of Mathematics in Philadelphia.

Often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, Fields Medals are awarded every four years to math researchers for outstanding work solving cutting-edge problems.

Yu Deng, 37, a professor at the University of Chicago born in China, won “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 Schrodinger dynamics,” the International Mathematical Union stated.

Ms Wang, 35, a professor at New York University and the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies in France, won for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.

The other two winners are Mr Tsimerman, 38, a professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Mr Pardon, 37, a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

Mr Tsimerman won “for his contribution in the recasting of o-minimality as a fundamental method of arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry and his role in the proof of many central conjectures, including Griffiths’ conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.”

Mr Pardon won the medal “for his achievements in symplectic geometry, including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain 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,” IMU stated.