Fields Medal List Leaked Early: Two Chinese Mathematicians Wang Hong and Deng Yu May Win in Same Year

On July 14, 2026, the official website of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2026) leaked the list of this year's Fields Medal winners due to a front-end code vulnerability. The leaked list shows that Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng, along with John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman, are the recipients. ICM has fixed the vulnerability, but the data has been preserved. If officially confirmed on July 23, this will be the first time two Chinese mathematicians win the Fields Medal in the same year, and Wang Hong will become the third female laureate.

Leak Details

• The vulnerability originated from the website's schedule API eventSnapshot, which returned all data, including entries marked as HIDDEN.
• Users fetched the data via curl command and searched for the HIDDEN keyword to obtain the names of the four winners.
• The same interface also leaked winners of other awards such as the Chern Medal, Gauss Prize, and others.
• After the news spread on platforms like Zhihu, the prediction market Polymarket saw the probability of these four winning surge to over 98%.

Hong Wang: Post-90s Peking University Alumna Who Solved the Kakeya Conjecture

• Born in 1991 in Guilin, Guangxi. In 2007, she scored 653 points in the college entrance exam and was admitted to Peking University's Department of Geophysics and Space Physics, later transferring to the Department of Mathematics. She earned her bachelor's degree in 2011.
• She studied in France, obtaining an engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a master's degree from Université Paris-Saclay. In 2019, she earned her PhD from MIT under the supervision of Larry Guth.
• She is currently a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. In 2025, she became the first female permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France.
• In 2025, together with Joshua Zahl, she solved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for a century and is closely related to harmonic analysis, number theory, and other fields.
• She has received the Salem Prize, the ICCM Mathematics Gold Medal, and the Ostrowski Prize.

Yu Deng: IMO Gold Medalist Who Solved Hilbert's Sixth Problem

• Born in 1989 in Shenzhen. He won a gold medal at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad (tied for sixth place worldwide) and was admitted to Peking University. In 2009, he transferred to MIT, where he earned his bachelor's degree.
• In 2015, he earned his PhD from Princeton University under the supervision of Alexandru D. Ionescu.
• He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago.
• In 2024-2025, together with Xiao Ma and Zaher Hani, he solved the weak Hilbert's sixth problem, rigorously deriving the macroscopic Boltzmann equation from microscopic particle systems. This is considered the most significant response to the problem in 125 years.
• The ICM website had previously marked Hilbert's sixth problem as "partially solved" and highlighted his work.

Historical Significance and Background

• If the list is confirmed, China will become the fifth country, after the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Russia, to have two mathematicians win the Fields Medal in the same year.
• Both Wang Hong and Yu Deng are alumni of Peking University's class of 2007, having completed their undergraduate education at PKU before pursuing further studies in the United States.
• Previously, the only ethnic Chinese Fields Medalists were Shing-Tung Yau (1982) and Terence Tao (2006), but neither received their undergraduate education in mainland China.
• In October 2025, the two jointly received the ICCM Mathematics Gold Medal at the World Congress of Chinese Mathematicians.
• This year's Fields Medal has drawn significant attention due to the leak, and it is also seen as a landmark event in the era of competition between human mathematicians and AI.