Fields Medal: Chinese win world’s top Maths prize for first time
Two Chinese academics have won the world’s largest mathematics prize for the first time, according to state media.
Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng won alongside John Pardon from the United States and Jacon Tsimerman from Canada. They won 15,000 Canadian dollars ($10,500; £8,000) each.
Both won for solving problems that have baffled mathematicians for more than a century. Wang, 35, who teaches in the USA and France, became the third woman to receive this honor.
The Fields Medal, considered mathematics’ equivalent to the Nobel prize, was handed out in the United States on Thursday at a time when human calculations are increasingly being challenged by artificial intelligence.
The success created a huge impact on Chinese social media.
The hashtags “Fields Medal” and “First Chinese mathematicians to win Fields Medals” sparked millions of views across various social media platforms, from Weibo to Rednote.
“The pride of all Chinese people,” reads one Weibo user’s comment.
Another said: “We are witnessing history.”
Chinese media also covered the two academics extensively; He published articles detailing everything from their educational background to their personal interests to what their achievements meant for the country.
“For the Chinese mathematics community, this is a dream we have been hoping to realize for decades,” said Shing-Tung Yau, Chinese Fields’ first ethnic medalist.
Wang, along with his colleague Josh Zahl, answered the question posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917: If you rotate a pencil so that it rotates completely around itself, what is the smallest area that the pencil covers?
Wang and Zahl analyzed the problem based on the assumption that the pen floats in a three-dimensional space rather than on a flat surface. They published their research last year.
“If this assumption affects people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon naturally occurs in problems in very different areas,” Wang told AFP News Agency.
Deng, a 37-year-old mathematics professor from the University of Chicago, was awarded the prize for his work on solving another age-old problem.
In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert asked what became known as Hilbert’s Sixth Problem: how to calculate the behavior of a whole based on the motion of individual particles.
Deng solved the problem by looking at the behavior of gases.
He said it was “a truly great honor to have my name listed after all those great mathematicians whom I have always admired.”
Wang worked on harmonic analysis, which studies the motion of waves.
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40.
