Hiraku Nakajima, president of the International Mathematical Union and chair of the Fields Medal selection committee, presented the four medals at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on July 23. The other recipients were Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.
The union cited Wang's work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.
Wang is Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute and, since September 2025, a permanent professor at France's Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. She is the first NYU faculty member to win the Fields Medal, the university said.
The medal has gone to a woman three times since it was first awarded in 1936. Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician at Stanford University, broke a run of 52 consecutive male recipients when she won in 2014 at 37, cited for her work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. She died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40.
