Three Chinese female mathematicians were awarded the Breakthrough Prize — known as the 'Oscars of Science' — on the 18th. The 2026 prize winners were recently announced in the United States, with six major prizes of $3 million USD (11.863 million MYR) each, recognizing scientists who have made major breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. The three Chinese female mathematicians — Wang Hong, Tang Yunqing, and Zhang Mingjia — all received awards.
According to Science and Technology Daily, Wang Hong and Tang Yunqing won the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, while Zhang Mingjia was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. Wang Hong, who works at the French Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, has rapidly emerged in the international mathematics community in recent years, becoming a widely watched young scholar in harmonic analysis.
Wang Hong, together with Josh Zahl, proved the three-dimensional case of the 'Kakeya conjecture.' This problem can be intuitively understood as: in space, if an 'infinitely thin' needle is spun in all directions, how large must the space be at minimum? Though it sounds intuitive, it has troubled mathematicians for decades. This achievement provides a key breakthrough for understanding the geometric structures and analytic patterns in high-dimensional spaces.
Tang Yunqing's research area is number theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on integers and their properties. Working with Vesselin Dimitrov, Tang Yunqing solved the long-standing 'Unbounded Denominator Conjecture.' This problem relates to 'modular forms,' a class of highly symmetric functions that are central in modern number theory and are closely related to major problems like elliptic curves and Fermat's Last Theorem. Their approach broke with traditional methods and even surprised many peers.
Subsequently, Tang Yunqing further proved the irrationality of a constant related to infinite series—that is, this number cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. Similar problems have major historical significance in mathematics. Since Roger Apéry's breakthrough in the 1970s, there had been limited progress in this direction, so this achievement is considered an important advance after decades of stagnation.