BEIJING —Two Chinese academics have been awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics achievement, an honor hailed across China as a milestone in the country’s bid to cement its role as a science and technology powerhouse.
Wang Hong and Deng Yu were named Thursday as among four laureates of the top prize, which is awarded every four years to outstanding mathematicians under 40 by the International Mathematical Union.
Wang and Deng won the prize alongside John Pardon from the US and Jacon Tsimerman from Canada. They each won 15,000 Canadian dollars ($10,500).
The Chinese academics won for solving problems that have baffled mathematicians for more than a century. And 35-year-old Wang, who teaches in the US and France, is only the third woman to receive the honor.
The Fields Medal, regarded as the Nobel prize equivalent for mathematics, was handed out on Thursday in Philadelphia, US, as human computations are increasingly challenged by AI.
The achievement has made huge waves on Chinese social media.
The hashtags “Fields Medal” and “First Chinese mathematicians to win Fields Medals” generated millions of views across various social media platforms from Weibo to Rednote.
Chinese media also extensively covered the two academics, with articles detailing everything from their educational backgrounds and personal interests to what their achievement means for the country.
“For the Chinese mathematics community, this is a dream we have been hoping to realise for decades,” said Shing-Tung Yau, the first ethnic Chinese Fields medallist.
Together with her colleague, Josh Zahl, Wang answered a question posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917: If you rotate a pencil so as to turn it completely around, what is the smallest area it sweeps out?
Wang and Zahl analysed the problem on the assumption that the pencil was floating in a three-dimensional space, rather than on a flat surface. They published their study last year.
“If this conjecture fascinates people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon shows up naturally in problems from very different fields,” Wang told AFP news agency.
Deng, a 37-year-old mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, was honored for his work solving another century-old problem.
In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert asked what would become known as Hilbert’s Sixth Problem, how the behavior of a whole can be calculated based on the movement of individual particles.
Deng solved the problem by looking at the behavior of gases.
He said it is a “really great honor to have my name listed after all those great mathematicians I’ve always been admiring”.
Wang has worked in hormonic analysis, which looks into the movement of waves.
Source: Saudi Gazette