王虹、邓煜同拿菲尔兹奖：中国籍数学家的历史性突破

Last Thursday, in Philadelphia, four mathematicians received the Fields Medal.

Just how much does the Fields Medal mean?

Put it this way: it's often called "the Nobel Prize of mathematics," but in many people's eyes, it's even harder to win than the Nobel.

The Nobel is awarded every year; the Fields Medal only once every four years — and only to people under forty.

In other words, you get at most a handful of shots in your whole life, and once you pass forty, no matter how brilliant you are, you're out.

Each edition, the whole world selects just two to four people.

This year four were chosen, and two of them are Chinese — Wang Hong and Deng Yu.

What makes it even more remarkable: these two aren't strangers. They were classmates in Peking University's math department, class of 2007.

Let's start with Wang Hong.

What she solved is an old problem that had puzzled mathematicians for over a century — the Kakeya conjecture.

You can start picturing it with a very intuitive image:

Hold a needle in your hand and point it, in turn, in every direction in space.

The region the needle sweeps out — how small can it possibly be?

It sounds like a brain teaser, but behind it lies a huge swath of modern math; many big problems are stuck right here.

Wang Hong and her collaborators completely proved this case in three-dimensional space.

Now Deng Yu.

With two colleagues, he did another "seemingly almost impossible" thing.

Over a century ago, the physicist Hilbert asked:

Can we start from the most basic rules and, step by step and rigorously, derive how a gas moves?

Put plainly: countless molecules in the air, each colliding at random — how does that become the wind, temperature, and airflow we feel?

From "individual molecules colliding" to "the fluid we see," no one had truly built that bridge in over a hundred years.

Deng Yu and his team were the first to build that bridge rigorously.

At this point you might ask: haven't ethnic Chinese won the Fields Medal before?

Didn't Shing-Tung Yau and Terence Tao both win it?

True — but there's one key difference: by the time they won, they were already American citizens.

Wang Hong and Deng Yu are the first mathematicians holding "Chinese nationality" to win the award.

That's also why, these past couple of days, China's math community has been practically boiling over.

The two of them carry one more especially moving contrast.

Deng Yu was the classic "gifted boy": as a teenager he won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad and was recommended straight into Peking University.

Wang Hong's path was exactly the opposite.

Her college-entrance score wasn't enough to go straight into the math department, so she was placed first in the School of Earth and Space Sciences.

Unwilling to accept that, she taught herself while preparing for a transfer exam, and by sheer effort got herself into the math department.

One a smooth-sailing prodigy, the other a fighter who cut in sideways and forced her own way in.

Two completely different roads met in the same classroom, and more than a decade later, stood together on the highest podium in world mathematics.

One more detail worth pausing on:

Wang Hong is the third woman in the history of the Fields Medal to win it.

In math, a field where women have long been scarce, that "third" carries real weight on its own.

Finally, a question for you:

A problem that generations spent a hundred years on without solving.

What kind of person is willing to bet the best years of their life on a question that might never be solved?