Three Princeton alumni awarded 2026 Fields Medal

The International Mathematical Union awarded the 2026 Fields Medal to four mathematicians on Thursday, three of whom are Princeton alumni. The three alumni include Yu Deng GS ’15, John Pardon ’11, and Jacob Tsimerman GS ’11. The fourth recipient, Hong Wang, was a Minerva Lecturer in the University’s mathematics department in 2025.  

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians to mathematicians under the age of 40 who have made major contributions to the discipline. Established in 1936 and named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, the award is widely regarded as the highest honor in mathematics.

Deng, Pardon, and Tsimerman join a group of 13 Fields medalists who are faculty or alumni. The most recent recipient of the award from Princeton was Professor of Mathematics June Huh, who received the medal in 2022. 

Deng was honored for his work in partial differential equations, Pardon for contributions to symplectic geometry, and Tsimerman for his contributions to arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry. 

Among his accolades, Pardon was valedictorian of his Princeton graduating class, and won the 2012 Morgan Prize, an award honoring outstanding undergraduate research in mathematics. He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2015 and became an assistant professor at Stanford after graduating the same year. Pardon was appointed a full professor at Princeton in 2016, just five years after he earned his A.B. Currently, he is a professor at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and the Department of Mathematics at Stony Brook University.

Pardon’s work focuses on the intersection of geometry, topology, and physics. As an undergraduate, he answered a question that Russian-French mathematician Mikhael Gromov had asked in 1983 regarding the parameters of measuring the geometric loop. Pardon proved the loop could not behave in the way Gromov hoped. Pardon also became fluent in Mandarin Chinese while a student at Princeton. 

Deng, who received his Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduated from Princeton with his Ph.D. in mathematics in 2015. He won the Jacobus Fellowship, the University’s top honor for graduate students. He is currently a professor at the University of Chicago. 

The focus of his Fields-awarded work was on figuring out how to derive the Boltzmann equation, which depicts how a fluid or gas can change over time, starting from Newton’s laws of motion. 

Tsimerman attended the University of Toronto when he was 16, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2006. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2011. At the Fields Medal ceremony, Tsimerman announced that he would be joining OpenAI to research the use of artificial intelligence. 

Tsimerman’s research focuses on arithmetic geometry, which focuses on applying techniques from algebraic geometry to number theory. His role in developing new methods to prove several mathematical equations – including the André-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties, contributed to his Fields Medal awarded research. 

None of the Fields Medal recipients responded to requests for comment in time for publication.

Clara Docherty is the assistant News editor for the ‘Prince’ leading faculty, graduate students, and alumni coverage. She is from Lafayette, N.J., and can be reached at clara.docherty[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.