MIT alumni Yu Deng '11 and Hong Wang PhD '19 were among the four young mathematicians awarded Fields Medals on July 23 at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The other two honorees were John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman. Yu Deng received his BS in mathematics at MIT in 2011, and was a Putnam Fellow in 2010. He earned his Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations (PDE), 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. His first published paper (in Analysis & PDE) was on the latter topic, and stemmed from summer research conducted at MIT on a problem suggested by Gigliola Staffilani. Deng is currently a professor at the University of Chicago. Hong Wang received her PhD at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Larry Guth PhD '05. She is awarded the Fields...
learn more
