08/12/2026
Hong Wang has been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, becoming only the third woman in history to win it -- after she solved the 3-D Kakeya conjecture, a problem that had stumped mathematicians for half a century. Often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the Fields Medal is awarded just once every four years, to a handful of researchers under forty. Dr. Wang, a 35-year-old professor at New York University and at France's Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, received hers in late July at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia.
She won for a 127-page proof, published last year with her collaborator Joshua Zahl, that other mathematicians have taken to calling a once-in-a-century achievement. The problem she cracked begins as a children's riddle and ends somewhere near the frontier of modern mathematics.
Picture a needle -- a chopstick, as Dr. Wang likes to put it -- and spin it so that it points, one by one, in every direction. How little space can it sweep? Surprisingly little: the answer, in an idealized form, shrinks all the way to nothing. What consumed the field for decades was a subtler version of that question in three dimensions, and it was this that Dr. Wang and Zahl finally settled, proving that such a set of directions, however cleverly it is folded, must always fill out the full three dimensions of the space it lives in.
Dr. Wang came to mathematics slowly, and by her own telling reluctantly. She grew up in Guilin, in southern China, reading Greek myths and "The Lord of the Rings" and playing badminton, the daughter of two schoolteachers who never pushed her toward the subject. What eventually drew her was not ambition but a longing for something solid: history could be rewritten, and English struck her as all exceptions, but a theorem, once proved, held forever. "No one can come and say, 'Oh, actually, this is not true,'" she said.
For a mathematician of her stature -- she beat her math-teacher father to the answer of a geometry puzzle at the age of six -- Dr. Wang has spent a large part of her life convinced she was not good enough. She missed the score she needed to study math at Peking University and had to work her way in from earth sciences. In France, she sat through graduate lectures in a language she could not yet speak, and at one point quit mathematics altogether for a semester to try architecture.
Ultimately what brought her back to mathematics was a single resolution: "I decided not to worry about whether I would be good or not, and just work on understanding better." Even now, a proof behind her that has reordered her field, she tends to describe her breakthroughs as luck -- and when someone points out that her colleagues consider her brilliant, she seems genuinely surprised to hear it.
Only two women had won the Fields Medal before her: Maryam Mirzakhani, the Iranian mathematician who broke the barrier in 2014, and Maryna Viazovska of Ukraine, in 2022. In the nearly ninety years since the medal was first given, they remain the only three.
Dr. Wang, for her part, is in no hurry to chase the next great problem. What she says she misses, and hopes to find her way back to, is the girl in Guilin with nothing to prove and, as she remembers it, infinite time to read. "I always wish that I could come back to that time," she said. "I think that time was really nice."
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Hong Wang is one of only three women ever to win the Fields Medal. To introduce children to the first, the trailblazing Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, we highly recommend the picture book "Maryam's Magic: The Story of Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani," for ages 5 to 9, at https://www.amightygirl.com/maryam-s-magic
Mirzakhani is also one of twenty trailblazing women of science and math featured in the illustrated biography "Born Curious: 20 Girls Who Grew Up to Be Awesome Scientists," for ages 6 to 10, at https://www.amightygirl.com/born-curious
For several Mighty Girl stories to encourage kids' excitement for math, we recommend "Ten Magic Butterflies" for ages 3 to 6 (https://www.amightygirl.com/ten-magic-butterflies), “Zero” for ages 3 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/zero), "Infinity and Me" for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/infinity-and-me), and "The Math Curse" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-math-curse)
For toys and games to inspire the next generation of Mighty Girl mathematicians, check out our blog post, “Add It Up! Top 35 Math Toys for Mighty Girls,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12180
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- To read more about Hong Wang's life and work, including a deeper look at the Kakeya problem she solved, you can read Natalie Wolchover's excellent profile, "Living Fully in the Math World Means Threading the Needle," in Quanta Magazine at https://www.quantamagazine.org/hong-wang-wins-2026-fields-medal-the-third-woman-ever-20260723/
- The New York Times also profiled her win in "Hong Wang Twirls in Fractal Dimensions of Three," at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/science/hong-wang-fields-medal.html
