Four mathematicians under the age of 40 have been awarded the 2026 Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, following an accidental API leak that spoiled the winners days before the official ceremony.
The Front-End Coding Error That Leaked Math’s Highest Honor
Four days before the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, a database vulnerability exposed the identities of the prize recipients. On the evening of July 13, a query of the official schedule application programming interface returned entries marked HIDDEN
without filtering them to the front end, techtimes.com.
A single command revealed four lecture records labeled HIDDEN Fields Medal Lecture,
each attached to a specific name: Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang. The discovery circulated rapidly on Chinese-language platforms, driving prediction markets to price the confirmation of all four names above 98 percent. Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University who publishes the blog Not Even Wrong, independently verified the names on July 15. The International Mathematical Union neither confirmed nor denied the leaked list prior to the opening ceremony.
Century-Scale Open Problems Resolved in a Four-Year Window
The Fields Medal, established in 1936 by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, is awarded every four years to researchers under 40. Funded from surplus proceeds of the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto, the monetary award has remained CA$15,000 since 2006, leaving the prize’s value tied entirely to its academic prestige.
What distinguishes this cohort is the scale of the historical problems resolved during the same four-year window. According to reporting by techtimes.com, the laureates addressed the Kakeya conjecture, open since 1917; the kinetic-theory portion of Hilbert’s Sixth Problem, open since 1900; the André-Oort conjecture, open for nearly 40 years; and a foundational body of work in symplectic topology.
Hong Wang and Yu Deng: Transforming Fluids and Wave Equations
Hong Wang, a mathematician at New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), became only the third woman to win a Fields Medal in the prize’s 90-year history, following Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014 and Maryna Viazovska in 2022. Wang and Yu Deng also mark the only Chinese-born recipients of the medal since Shing-Tung Yau won in 1982.
At age 34, Scientific American reported that Wang and collaborator Joshua Zahl proved a fundamental limit for the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture in 2025, solving a problem described by Rice University mathematician Nets Katz as a holy grail
quest.
“She solved the ‘holy grail’ problem.”
Nets Katz, mathematician at Rice University
Meanwhile, Yu Deng of the University of Chicago shared the honor for his work reconciling microscopic and macroscopic descriptions of fluid motion. Mathematicians had struggled for over a century to bridge chaotic molecular interactions with continuous macroscopic laws. Deng and his co-authors proved that the equations governing fluids across different scales are fundamentally the same, a breakthrough Scott Armstrong of NYU called a truly spectacular, singular result
in coverage by scientificamerican.com.
Jacob Tsimerman Secures Canada’s First Fields Medal
Jacob Tsimerman, a professor at the University of Toronto, received the medal for his contributions to number theory, including his role in proving the André-Oort conjecture. As detailed by the University of Toronto, Tsimerman is the first scholar based at a Canadian institution and the second Canadian to win the prize since it was established in 1932.
Tsimerman encountered the André-Oort conjecture during his PhD studies at Princeton University under number theorist Peter Sarnak. His research confirms that special points appearing in large numbers within geometric spaces do so because they belong to hidden geometric structures.
“It’s an incredible honour to win this award – not just for me, but for all my collaborators without whom this truly would not be possible.”
Jacob Tsimerman, professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto
A Congress Proceeding Amid Political Friction in Philadelphia
The 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians runs from July 23 to 30 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, marking the first time the event has been held in the United States in more than forty years. The gathering proceeded despite significant controversy. More than 2,300 mathematicians signed a petition urging relocation due to suspended visa processing across 75 countries and immigration enforcement presence in major U.S. cities, according to techtimes.com.
Institutional pushback accompanied the petition. The French Mathematical Society canceled its exhibition stand at the congress, while the Cuban Society of Mathematics and the Brazilian Mathematical Society withdrew their participation entirely. Despite these absences, the International Mathematical Union confirmed the event would proceed as scheduled in a March 30, 2026 decision.
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