Fields Medal 2026 Leak: Winners List Revealed Early — Two Chinese Mathematicians Among Four

On July 14, 2026, the official website of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2026) leaked the Fields Medal winners list ahead of the ceremony through a front-end API flaw. The leaked list names Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang (NYU Courant / IHES) and Yu Deng (University of Chicago), alongside John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman. ICM has patched the flaw, but the data had already been archived. If confirmed at the official announcement on July 23, it would be the first time two Chinese-born mathematicians share the prize in the same year, and Wang would become the third woman ever to win a Fields Medal.

How the list leaked

• The flaw was in the schedule API endpoint eventSnapshot, which returned full data including entries flagged as HIDDEN.
• A simple curl request plus a search for the HIDDEN keyword exposed all four winners' names.
• The same endpoint also leaked winners of the Abacus Medal, Chern Medal, Gauss Prize and other ICM awards.
• After the leak spread on Zhihu and other platforms, prediction market Polymarket pushed the four candidates' implied odds above 98%.

Hong Wang: the 90s-born solver of the Kakeya conjecture

• Born 1991 in Guilin, China; entered Peking University in 2007, later moving from geophysics to mathematics (B.S. 2011).
• Earned an engineering degree at École Polytechnique and a master's at Paris-Saclay, then a PhD at MIT in 2019 under Larry Guth.
• Now professor at NYU's Courant Institute; in 2025 became the first female permanent professor at IHES (France).
• In 2025, with Joshua Zahl, she resolved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a century-old problem tied to harmonic analysis and number theory.
• Previous honors include the Salem Prize, the ICCM Gold Medal of Mathematics, and the Ostrowski Prize.

Yu Deng: the IMO gold medalist behind Hilbert's sixth problem

• Born 1989 in Shenzhen; IMO gold medalist in 2006 (tied 6th worldwide), admitted to Peking University, transferred to MIT in 2009.
• PhD at Princeton in 2015 under Alexandru D. Ionescu; now professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago.
• In 2024-2025, with Xiao Ma and Zaher Hani, he resolved the narrow Hilbert sixth problem, rigorously deriving the macroscopic Boltzmann equation from microscopic particle systems — described as the most important answer to the problem in 125 years.
• ICM's own site had already marked Hilbert's sixth problem as "partially solved", highlighting his work.

Why it matters

• If confirmed, China would become the fifth country (after the US, France, UK, Russia) to have two mathematicians win in the same year.
• Both Wang and Deng were Peking University class of 2007 undergraduates before pursuing doctorates in the US.
• Previous Chinese-descent Fields Medalists — Shing-Tung Yau (1982) and Terence Tao (2006) — were not undergrad-educated in mainland China.
• In October 2025 the two shared the ICCM Gold Medal of Mathematics.
• This Fields Medal cycle has drawn unusual attention due to the leak, and is seen as a symbolic moment in the era of human mathematicians competing with AI.