Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng won alongside John Pardon from the US and Jacon Tsimerman from Canada. They each won 15,000 Canadian dollars ($10,500; £8,000).

Both won for solving problems that have baffled mathematicians for more than a century. And 35-year-old Wang, who teaches in the US and France, is only the third woman to receive the honour.

The Fields Medal, regarded as the Nobel prize equivalent for mathematics, was handed out on Thursday in the US as human computations are increasingly challenged by AI.

The achievement has made waves on Chinese social media.

The hashtags “Fields Medal” and “First Chinese mathematicians to win Fields Medals” generated millions of views across various social media platforms from Weibo to Rednote.

“Pride of all Chinese people,” a comment from a Weibo user reads.

“We are witnessing history,” another said.

Chinese media also extensively covered the two academics, with articles detailing everything from their educational backgrounds and personal interests to what their achievement means for the country.

“For the Chinese mathematics community, this is a dream we have been hoping to realise for decades,” said Shing-Tung Yau, the first ethnic Chinese Fields medallist.

Together with her colleague, Josh Zahl, Wang answered a question posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917: If you rotate a pencil so as to turn it completely around, what is the smallest area it sweeps out?

Wang and Zahl analysed the problem on the assumption that the pencil was floating in a three-dimensional space, rather than on a flat surface. They published their study last year.

“If this conjecture fascinates people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon shows up naturally in problems from very different fields,” Wang told AFP News Agency.

Deng, a 37-year-old mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, was honoured for his work solving another century-old problem.

In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert asked what would become known as Hilbert’s Sixth Problem: how the behaviour of a whole can be calculated based on the movement of individual particles.

Deng solved the problem by looking at the behaviour of gases.

He said it is a “really great honour to have my name listed after all those great mathematicians I’ve always been admiring”.

Wang has worked in harmonic analysis, which looks into the movement of waves.

The Fields Medal is given every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40.

Born in China, trained abroad

Born in 1991 in the tourist city of Guilin in the southern region of Guangxi, Wang skipped two grades in primary school and was admitted to China’s prestigious Peking University in 2007 at the age of 16.

Although she initially majored in earth sciences, she transferred to the mathematics department a year later.

After graduating, she pursued further studies abroad, studying at Paris-Sud University and the École Polytechnique in France, and earned her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

She is now a professor at New York University and a permanent professor at France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES).

On Thursday night, she received a phone call from French President Emmanuel Macron, who congratulated her on receiving the medal. “She embodies the excellence of our research and our training,” Macron said in a post on X. “Choose France for science,” he added.

Deng, who began taking part in mathematics competitions while in primary school, was admitted to Peking University in 2007 – the same year as Wang – but transferred to MIT in 2009.

He earned his doctorate from Princeton University and has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 2024. (BBC)

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