Hong Wang, PhD, is the third woman and the first Chinese woman to win the Fields Medal. She graduated from Peking University in 2001, then completed graduate studies at École Polytechnique and Paris-Sud University in France. She earned her PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. Working with her co-author Joshua Zahl, Wang resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, which studies the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions. Other awards Wang has received include the Salem Prize, the Ostrowski Prize, and the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians’ Gold Medal of Mathematics in 2025. Currently, she is a professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in France.
