For the first time, China has produced Fields Medal winners educated on its own soil – and two at once.
Chinese mathematicians Wang Hong and Deng Yu took the honour, alongside John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman.
The Fields Medal is the top honour for young mathematicians under 40 years of age. The medals, along with a modest cash prize, were given out on Thursday at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia.
The prestigious medal, often called the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”, has been awarded since 1936, but this is the first time a Chinese national has won it.
It is also the first time that two mathematicians who completed their undergraduate training in mainland China have shared the prize in the same year.
With this, China becomes the fifth country – after the United States, France, Britain and Russia – to produce two Fields laureates in a single ceremony, and the first Asian nation to do so.
Only two other ethnic Chinese mathematicians have won the Fields Medal: Shing-Tung Yau in 1982 and Terence Tao in 2006, but neither held Chinese citizenship at the time. China’s mathematics community had been waiting for this moment for decades.