Mathematician Hong Wang (X 2010 awarded two new prestigious international awards

A native of Guangxi Province in China, Hong Wang (X2010) has been awarded two prestigious mathematics honors: the Clay Research Award and the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.

The Clay Research Award is a mathematics prize presented by the Clay Mathematics Institute to recognize the outstanding achievements of exceptionally talented mathematicians each year.

The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize has been awarded annually since 2016 to several young researchers; the prize is worth $100,000 and is intended for young mathematicians who have already accomplished significant work. The prizes are funded by a grant from the Mark Zuckerberg Foundation to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and by a grant from the Milner Foundation. The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize is part of the Breakthrough Prizes.

Hong Wang earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2011 and entered the Cycle Ingénieur Polytechnicien program at École Polytechnique in 2010 before completing a master’s degree in mathematics at Paris-Saclay University in 2014.

She then moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. under the supervision of Larry Guth at MIT, which she completed in 2019. Following her dissertation, she joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a postdoctoral researcher, before becoming an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and then an Associate Professor at the Courant Institute at NYU, where she has been working since 2023. She is a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) at the University Paris-Saclay.

A specialist in harmonic analysis, Hong Wang was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in 2022 for “her advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and other related problems.” More recently, Hong Wang and her co-author Joshua Zahl made headlines by announcing a proof of the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, a problem that had remained open for over a century, at the intersection of analysis and geometry.

Hong Wang is also been awarded the Frontier of Science Award (2023, 2025), the Antonio Ambrosetti Medal (2025), the Ostrowski Prize (2025), the Salem Prize (2025), the Gold Medal of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (2025), and the Sadosky Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics (2026).