From July 23 to July 30, 2026, the International Congress of Mathematicians is taking place in Philadelphia. This is the largest congress in the mathematical community, organized once every four years under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

Traditionally, during the opening ceremony on the first day of the congress, the Fields Medal—the most prestigious award in mathematics—is presented. The Fields Medal is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863–1932) and is awarded to mathematicians up to 40 years of age for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics. The award was first presented in 1936, and since 1950 it has been awarded every four years.

Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics”, the medal is awarded in recognition of outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and the promise of future achievement.

At this year’s International Congress, the four 2026 Fields Medal laureates were officially announced: Yu Deng (37), University of Chicago, USA; John Pardon (37), Stony Brook University, USA; Jacob Tsimerman (38), University of Toronto, Canada; and Hong Wang (35), New York University, USA, and IHÉS, France.

For the third time in the history of the award, one of the Fields Medal recipients is a woman. The first female winner of the award was Maryam Mirzakhani, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, California, USA, who was a laureate in 2014. In 2022, Maryna Viazovska was honored with the prestigious award.

Yu Deng is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.

John Pardon is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for his achievements in symplectic geometry, including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of Liouville manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory. John Pardon is well known to the mathematical community in Bulgaria; he has participated in two conferences of the International Center for Mathematical Sciences in Sofia.

Jacob Tsimerman is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for his role in the vast extension of the scope of o-minimal techniques within arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, including the proof of Griffiths’ conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps.

Hong Wang is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.

Shayan Oveis Gharan (40), University of Washington, USA, is awarded the 2026 IMU Abacus Medal for his landmark contributions to the theory of algorithms, taking the analysis of algorithms beyond combinatorics and probabilistic analysis into the theory of the geometry of polynomials and related topics. This theory has led to deeper understanding of distributions on spanning trees and matroid bases in general. Oveis Gharan’s work improved the approximation of the metric travelling salesperson problem, breaking the limit on the approximation factor in Christofides’ 3/2-algorithm from 50 years ago, and led to a revolution in the understanding of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms (proving the Mihail-Vazirani conjecture and giving a self-contained proof that resolved the strongest version of Mason’s conjecture) through spectral independence.

More about the prizes and the laureates can be found at https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/fields-medal/fields-medals-2026