Three Chinese women mathematicians gained global recognition after winning major awards at the 2026 Breakthrough Prize, widely known as the "Oscars of Science."
At the April 18 ceremony in Los Angeles, Wang Hong and Tang Yunqing received the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, while Zhang Mingjia was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for early-career women mathematicians, according to CGTN.
Wang Hong, 35, a professor at New York University's Courant Institute and a permanent professor at France's IHES, was recognized for her work in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations and geometric measure theory, including contributions to the local smoothing conjecture, the Furstenberg set conjecture and the Kakeya conjecture. Her February 2025 paper with Joshua Zahl resolved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem first posed in 1917.
Wang also received the 2026 Clay Research Award on April 14. Her recent achievements have positioned her as a potential Fields Medal contender. Only two women have won the Fields Medal in its 90-year history.
Tang Yunqing, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, shared the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize with Bulgarian mathematician Vesselin Dimitrov for solving long-standing problems in number theory. Together with Frank Calegari, they proved the "unbounded denominators conjecture" concerning modular forms, and later proved the irrationality of a number linked to a basic infinite series – the first such result since Roger Apéry's work more than 45 years ago. They were also awarded the 2026 Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory. Tang earned her PhD from Harvard in 2016.
Zhang Mingjia, an instructor at Princeton University and a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, received the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize after completing her PhD in 2023 under 2018 Fields Medal winner Peter Scholze. Her research focuses on Shimura varieties, combining number theory and algebraic geometry.
𝗗𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗔𝗽𝗽 ↓
