Wang Hong, a 34-year-old Chinese mathematician, is a strong candidate for the 2026 Fields Medal after solving a more than 100-year-old problem.

In late February, Wang Hong, from New York University (USA), and his colleague Joshua Zahl from the University of British Columbia (Canada) made a groundbreaking contribution to the field of Mathematics by solving the Kakeya conjecture in three-dimensional space.

The problem was inspired by a question posed by Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya in 1917: What is the smallest area that an infinitely thin needle can sweep when rotating?

This problem has been solved in two-dimensional space, but its three-dimensional solution has puzzled mathematicians around the world for more than a century. Over the years, this question has evolved into the study of Kakeya sets - shapes that contain a line segment in all directions in a given space.

Wang and Zahl have shown that Kakeya sets cannot be “too small” – that is, they must be three-dimensional, even though they may not have three-dimensional volume.

Wang’s proof was published on February 24 in a 127-page paper on the open-access arXiv repository. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, but has already made headlines in the mathematics community.

“I am very pleased to announce that the Kakeya set conjecture, one of the most widely studied open problems in geometric measure theory, has been proved in three dimensions by Hong Wang and Joshua Zahl,” wrote Terence Tao, a 2006 Fields Medal winner, in a post on the social networking site Mastodon.

Wang’s result marks a milestone with far-reaching implications for mathematical research, especially in harmonic analysis, number theory and additive combinatorics. The breakthrough could have implications for applications in computer science and cryptography, such as imaging, data processing, and wireless communications.

Eyal Lubetzky, head of the Department of Mathematics at the Courant Institute, New York University, USA, called it one of the top mathematical achievements of the 21st century.

Hong Wang is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute. At the age of 16, she scored 653/750 points on the Chinese university entrance exam and was admitted to the Department of Earth Sciences at Peking University, then transferred to the Department of Mathematics. Wang earned her master's degree from the University of Paris Sud and Ecole Polytechnique (France), and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA).

Many experts consider Wang a strong candidate for the 2026 Fields Medal, which is known as the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics". If this comes true, Wang will be the first Chinese woman to receive this prestigious award.

In history, no Chinese mathematician has won the Fields Medal, except for Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese-American, and Terence Tao, a Chinese-Australian.