Before he won a Fields Medal for his pioneering work balancing randomness and order, Yu Deng first had to achieve equilibrium in his own life.

Before he won a Fields Medal for his pioneering work balancing randomness and order, Yu Deng first had to achieve equilibrium in his own life.

Yu Deng, a winner of the 2026 Fields Medal, said that there were virtually no reference materials available for the problem he was trying to solve, forcing him to develop the…