中国人第一次拿到“数学界的诺贝尔奖”：王虹、邓煜与菲尔兹奖

Let me start with a question: just how good can the very best at math be?

This year, that question got an answer, from two Chinese people.

One is named Wang Hong, the other Deng Yu.

This week, the two of them together won the biggest prize in math — the Fields Medal.

You can think of the Fields Medal as "the Nobel Prize of math."

But it's even harder to win than the Nobel Prize.

Why do I say that?

First, it's given only once every four years.

Second, only to people who are still young, under forty.

Third, each time it goes to just two to four people.

So worldwide, very, very few people hold this prize.

What's rarer still: among this year's four, two are Chinese — and old classmates at that.

Let's start with Wang Hong.

She figured out an old problem more than a hundred years old.

You can picture it like this:

In your hand is a very thin needle.

You turn it in a full circle, pointing it in every direction.

The area the needle sweeps takes up some space.

How small can that space possibly be?

It sounds simple, but this problem stumped mathematicians for over a hundred years.

Wang Hong figured it out.

Deng Yu's problem was a different kind of hard.

Think about it: the air is full of tiny, tiny things we call molecules.

These molecules are always moving, bumping into one another, colliding back and forth.

Yet what we humans see is wind, heat, weather.

From "molecules colliding" to "the wind and heat we feel," no one had ever fully connected the path.

Deng Yu and two colleagues connected that path.

Now let's talk about why Chinese people are so happy.

In the past, ethnic Chinese did win the Fields Medal — Shing-Tung Yau and Terence Tao, for example.

But by the time they won, they were already American citizens.

Wang Hong and Deng Yu are different — when they won, they were still Chinese nationals.

So people say they are the first two "Chinese nationals" to win the Fields Medal.

Their story has one more especially interesting side.

Deng Yu was the classic "gifted kid" — as a teenager he won a gold medal at an international competition.

Wang Hong's road was different.

At first her exam score wasn't high enough to get into Peking University's math department.

She went into another department, studying on her own and testing until she finally transferred into math.

The two became classmates at Peking University, then later went to America to study together.

This year, the two of them again stood together at the highest place in the mathematical world.

There's one more point especially worth making.

Wang Hong is only the third woman ever to win the Fields Medal.

In math, women have always been few.

So Wang Hong's achievement made a lot of people especially happy.

Think about it:

A hard task that many worked on for a hundred years without finishing.

What kind of person is willing to keep at it?