The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2026, held in Philadelphia from July 23 to 30, has recognized researchers who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics, its applications, and its dissemination. The awards of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) were announced during the opening ceremony of the congress.
Registrations for the School of History of Mathematics 2025 are now open 2026 Fields Medals have been awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman i Hong Wang. This distinction recognizes exceptional mathematical achievements and the potential for future contributions by young mathematicians.
Yu Deng, from the University of Chicago, has been distinguished for his work on partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from the dynamics of hard spheres.
John Pardon, from Stony Brook University, has received the Fields Medal for his contributions to symplectic geometry, topology, and knot theory. His research includes new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories, and the counting of holomorphic curves.
Jacob Tsimerman, from the University of Toronto, has been recognized for establishing o-minimality as a fundamental tool in arithmetic and complex geometry. His work includes a relevant role in the proof of central conjectures, such as the Griffiths conjecture on the algebraicity of images of period maps and the André-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.
Hong Wang, from New York University and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), has received the distinction for her research in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. Her contributions include advances in Fourier restriction problems, Falconer and Furstenberg sets, and the Kakeya problem in dimension three.
The official page of the 2026 Fields Medals includes the full citations of the four awardees.
Other awards of the International Mathematical Union
The IMU has awarded the Abacus Medal a Shayan Oveis Gharan, from the University of Washington, for his fundamental contributions to the theory of algorithms and the mathematical aspects of information sciences. His research has provided new results on optimization problems, spanning trees, matroid bases, and sampling algorithms.
The Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize has been awarded to Yurii Nesterov, from the Université catholique de Louvain, for his contributions to mathematical optimization. His results have provided theoretical and algorithmic foundations for numerous numerical and data-based fields.
The Chern Medal has recognized Graeme Segal, from the University of Oxford, for a career of profound and lasting influence in topology, mathematical physics, representation theory, and category theory.
The Leelavati Prize “Root ideals of p-th powers of plane curves in positive characteristic”, Hannah Fry, from the University of Cambridge, for her outreach work. Through books, television programs, and audiovisual content, Fry has brought mathematical thinking to very broad audiences.
Finally, Karen Vogtmann has been the speaker of the ICM Emmy Noether Lecture 2026, a congress tradition that is formally not an award but recognizes women with fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences.
The ICM 2026 awards show the vitality of contemporary mathematics, from differential equations, geometry, and number theory to algorithms, optimization, applications, and scientific outreach. This news will soon be expanded with the presentation videos of the awardees shown during the ceremony.