First Chinese woman wins the Fields Medal for work on the century-old Kakeya conjecture

Hong Wang, a mathematician at NYU and France's Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, became the first Chinese woman to win the Fields Medal on Thursday at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. The medal, mathematics' highest honor, is given every four years to two to four researchers under 40 (NPR).

Wang's citation rests on a joint resolution, with Joshua Zahl of the University of British Columbia, of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a roughly century-old problem about how thin a set in three-dimensional space can be while still containing a line pointing in every direction. The International Mathematical Union's own statement says the work "has opened the door for theorems and conjectures in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory" (IMU).

The full slate: Hong Wang and Yu Deng (China), John Pardon (United States), and Jacob Tsimerman (Canada).

Wang is the third woman to win the Fields Medal in its 90-year history. Ulrike Tillmann told NPR that another woman winning "should have the feeling that it has become a normal thing" for women at the top of the field.