Three IAS Scholars Honored with Highest Prize in Mathematics
Three of the four winners of this year’s Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, are IAS-affiliated scholars. The Medal, awarded every four years at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), hosted this year in Philadelphia, recognizes “outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.”
The 2026 winners include Jacob Tsimerman, Ashvin B. Chhabra and Daniela Bonafede-Chhabra Member and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, who has been leading the School’s 2025–26 special year on arithmetic geometry, Hodge theory, and o-minimality; Hong Wang, Member (2019–21) in the School, whose research explores Fourier analysis and related problems; and John Pardon, Visitor (2016–17) in the School, who dedicated his time at IAS to understanding Fukaya categories of Stein manifolds.
Tsimerman's contributions to "the recasting of o-minimality as a fundamental method of arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry," were highlighted in his Fields Medal citation, as was his role "in the proof of many central conjectures including Griffiths's conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps, and the André-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties."
Meanwhile, Wang was praised for having made "a series of major breakthroughs on some of the most central problems in analysis," especially her "applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation." Her "major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions," were likewise noted.
Described as "a mathematician of extraordinary depth and originality," Pardon received the award for his "new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain manifolds and counting holomorphic curves." His contributions "to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory," were also noted.
With these latest additions, IAS scholars have now won 49 of the 68 total Fields Medals awarded since 1936. IAS permanent Faculty who have previously received the award include Robert and Luisa Fernholz Professor Akshay Venkatesh, who won in 2018, and Elon Lindenstrauss, Professor in the School of Mathematics, who was recognized in 2010. Visiting IAS scholars have also been among the recipients. This includes June Huh, Veblen Fellow (2014–17), Visiting Professor (2017–20), and Distinguished Visiting Professor (2024–25), who received the award in 2022 alongside Maryna Viazovska, Member (2023), who is well known for her pioneering solution to the sphere packing problem.
“The Institute is dedicated to attracting and nurturing those who can move beyond the borders of the known, so it is a particular pleasure to congratulate these three new Fields medalists from our community,” stated IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg. “This recognition of their groundbreaking work serves as a joyful reminder that when talented people are given total freedom to pursue their ideas, they can greatly extend the contours of mathematics.”
The IMU also saw the announcement of the 2026 Chern Medal Award, which is presented to "an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics." The Medal was presented to Graeme Segal, Member (1969–70) in the School of Mathematics, for "his visionary mathematical insights," which the citation described as having had "an enduring influence in a wide range of fields, including topology, mathematical physics, representation theory and category theory."
Read more about the 2026 Fields Medalists on the IMU website.
