Two major mathematics awards were simultaneously presented to Wang Hong. Three alumni from Peking University swept the "Chinese Fields Medal."
Two heavyweight mathematics awards were presented on the same day, and Wang Hong was among the recipients.
The 2025 Salem Prize in the international mathematics community was awarded to Wang Hong and Vesselin Dimitrov.
The Salem Prize is regarded as an indicator of the Fields Medal. According to statistics, among the 56 Salem Prize recipients from 1968 to 2024, 10 went on to win the Fields Medal. For example, Terence Tao won the Salem Prize in 2000 and the Fields Medal in 2006.
After the announcement of the award list, Terence Tao immediately posted a message to congratulate.
On the other hand, the Gold Medal of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) was awarded to Wang Hong, Deng Yu, and Yuan Xinyi. All three are alumni of the School of Mathematics at Peking University.
The International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians was initiated by Shing-Tung Yau and is held every three years. Like the Fields Medal, it is restricted to mathematicians under 45 years old and is also known as the "Chinese Fields Medal".
Double happiness! Congratulations!
From Changing Majors Midway to a Tenured Professor at a Top Mathematics Institution
Wang Hong's resume is truly that of a top - notch academic. She originally studied at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University and later switched to mathematics due to her love for it.
After graduating from Peking University in 2011, she went to the École Polytechnique in France for further studies and obtained a master's degree from the University of Paris - Sud.
In 2019, she completed her doctoral degree at MIT under the supervision of the famous mathematician Larry Guth. Then she completed her post - doctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and joined the University of California, Los Angeles as an assistant professor in 2021.
In 2023, she was hired as an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and was recently promoted to a full professor this year.
Wang Hong is also a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES). She is the first female tenured professor in the history of IHES and the 14th tenured professor in the field of mathematics at the institute.
Previously, 8 out of the 13 tenured professors at IHES have won the Fields Medal, which shows the high value of this position.
The reason for her to win the Salem Prize this time is "her role in solving major open problems in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory".
This is also her main research direction, and she has made breakthrough progress in several century - old problems.
Especially this year, she collaborated with Professor Joshua Zahl from Columbia University and announced in a 127 - page paper that they had proved the Kakeya set conjecture, which has puzzled the mathematics community for many years.
In addition, she has also made important contributions to problems such as the Fourier restriction conjecture and the Falconer distance set conjecture. She has published two articles in the top four mathematics journals this year alone.
In July this year, Wang Hong returned to Peking University to give a three - day lecture, and the lecture hall was packed.
Academician Tian Gang and Wei Dongyi were sitting in the front row listening attentively.
Many scholars believe that Wang Hong will be one of the young mathematicians most likely to win the Fields Medal because of the significant achievement of proving the Kakeya set conjecture.
Now, with the Salem Prize and the Gold Medal of the ICCM, her chances of winning the Fields Medal have increased.
Three Alumni of the School of Mathematics at Peking University Win Awards
The other two who won the ICCM Gold Medal with Wang Hong, Deng Yu and Yuan Xinyi, are also outstanding mathematicians.
First, Deng Yu, who is currently a professor at the University of Chicago. After graduating from Shenzhen Senior High School, he entered the School of Mathematics at Peking University in 2007. He transferred to MIT in his junior year and obtained his doctoral degree from Princeton University.
During this period, he won the highest award in the Putnam Competition for Undergraduate Students - Putnam Fellow, an IMO Gold Medal, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the ICBS Frontier Award in Mathematical Sciences, and the MCA Award.
His main research directions include nonlinear dispersive equations and wave equations, fluid dynamics, harmonic analysis, probability theory of partial differential equations, and statistical physics. He has published many articles in the top four mathematics journals.
He and his collaborators have made a series of important achievements in the field of partial differential equations and mathematical physics, including: proving the invariance of the Gibbs measure in the two - dimensional higher - order Schrödinger equation; strictly verifying the validity of the limit equation on the optimal time scale in the study of the weak turbulence problem of the Schrödinger equation; jointly proving the global existence of small initial - value solutions for the three - dimensional gravity - surface tension water wave equation; and revealing the instability of the two - dimensional Couette flow in the super - critical function space in the field of fluid mechanics.
His most remarkable achievement at present is the breakthrough of the Hilbert's Sixth Problem with Ma Xiao and Zaher Hani at the beginning of this year.
This problem is one of the 23 mathematical problems proposed by David Hilbert in 1900. Well - known problems among them include the Riemann Hypothesis and the Goldbach Conjecture. The sixth problem requires scholars to derive the basic equations in fluid mechanics from Newtonian mechanics through the Boltzmann kinetic theory.
To put it simply, it means to strictly apply mathematical methods to physics and establish a mathematical axiom system for physics.
However, there is a huge mathematical gap from the particle system to gas dynamics to fluid mechanics, which has puzzled the mathematics community for more than a hundred years. Until Deng Yu and his two colleagues achieved a mathematically rigorous derivation chain through the Hard - Sphere Model of Dilute Gases and the Boltzmann Equation.
First, in the hard - sphere model (a large number of small - diameter particles undergoing elastic collisions), the Boltzmann - Grad limit is used to control the microscopic behavior. Then, the Boltzmann equation is extended to any given existence time, greatly extending the time scale of the mesoscopic theory. On this basis, through an appropriate fluid limit, the Boltzmann equation is derived to the macroscopic fluid equation, and finally the Euler equation for compressible fluids and the Navier - Stokes - Fourier equation under incompressible conditions are derived.
As for why he suddenly turned to the Boltzmann equation as a solution path, Deng Yu once explained on Zhihu:
Actually, it was just a happy accident.
In an accidental chat, I learned that the Boltzmann equation could be used for long - time derivation of major open problems. Since I was quite confident that the long - time WKE could be proved at that time, I thought of applying the NLS technology in reverse to the particle system. This is the original origin of these two Boltzmann - related articles.
The other winner, Yuan Xinyi, is a member of the famous "Golden Generation" of mathematicians from Peking University.
He is from Macheng City, Hubei Province. After winning an IMO Gold Medal in 2000, he entered the School of Mathematics at Peking University for his undergraduate studies and then obtained his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of the Chinese mathematician Zhang Shouwu.
Currently, he has returned to his alma mater, Peking University, and serves as a professor at the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research.
Yuan Xinyi's research mainly focuses on fields such as Arakelov geometry, algebraic dynamics, Diophantine geometry, Shimura varieties, and special values of L - functions, and he has achieved remarkable results in these fields.
In 2022, he collaborated with Xie Junyi to prove all cases of the geometric Bogomolov conjecture. In 2024, he independently constructed an admissible canonical bundle for a family of quasi - projective curves and proved a unified Bogomolov - type theorem for curves. He has also published a series of important papers in the top four mathematics journals.
He was the first Chinese to receive the research fellowship from the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States and won the Science Exploration Award in 2022.