Hong Wang Breaks New Ground with 2026 Fields Medal win

Hong Wang and collaborator Joshua Zahl proved the 3D Kakeya set conjecture, a landmark result at the crossroads of harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and PDE, earning Wang the 2026 Fields Medal—the third woman to win the prize. The award caps a remarkable journey from Guilin to France, MIT, and NYU, and showcases Wang’s use of multiscale analysis and innovative “sticky” Kakeya techniques to rule out counterexamples, reshaping the field and pointing to future work on higher-dimensional Kakeya problems.