On Wang Hong, Math Olympiad Competitions, and the Freedom to Run Schools
On July 23, Wang Hong and Deng Yu received the 2026 Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Philadelphia. Both were undergraduate alumni of Peking University, class of 2007. The International Mathematical Union’s commendation of Wang Hong was not limited to her role in solving the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture; it also encompassed a series of achievements in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including problems such as local smoothing, Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, and planar Furstenberg sets. After the award was announced, Wang Hong’s student years were rapidly rewritten into several mutually opposed educational parables. One narrative emphasizes the foundational training in Peking University’s mathematics department,…
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