The Fields Medal


John Charles Fields' Will established the Fields Medal, which has played the role of the Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

The International Congress of Mathematicians at Zurich in 1932 adopted his proposal, and the Fields Medal was first awarded at the next congress, held at Oslo in 1936. Fields Medals were not awarded during World War II so the second Fields Medals were not awarded until 1950.

Fields wished that the awards should recognize both existing mathematical work and also the promise of future achievement. To fit with these wishes Fields Medals may only be awarded to mathematicans under the age of 40.

In 2026 medals were awarded to:
Yu Deng
For his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrodinger dynamics.

John Pardon
For his achievements in symplectic geometry including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory.

Jacob Tsimerman
For his contribution in the recasting of o-minimality as a fundamental method of arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and his role in the proof of many central conjectures including Griffiths' conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps, and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.

Hong Wang
For her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.
The list of winners is given below.

1936 L V Ahlfors
1936 J Douglas
1950 L Schwartz
1950 A Selberg
1954 K Kodaira
1954 J-P Serre
1958 K F Roth
1958 R Thom
1962 L V Hörmander
1962 J W Milnor
1966 M F Atiyah
1966 P J Cohen
1966 A Grothendieck
1966 S Smale
1970 A Baker
1970 H Hironaka
1970 S P Novikov
1970 J G Thompson
1974 E Bombieri
1974 D B Mumford
1978 P R Deligne
1978 C L Fefferman
1978 G A Margulis
1978 D G Quillen
1982 A Connes
1982 W P Thurston
1982 S-T Yau
1986 S Donaldson
1986 G Faltings
1986 M Freedman
1990 V Drinfeld
1990 V Jones
1990 S Mori
1990 E Witten
1994 P-L Lions
1994 J-C Yoccoz
1994 J Bourgain
1994 E Zelmanov
1998 R Borcherds
1998 T Gowers
1998 M Kontsevich
1998 C McMullen
2002 L Lafforgue
2002 V Voevodsky
2006 A Okounkov
2006 G Perelman (who declined it)
2006 T Tao
2006 W Werner
2010 E Lindenstrauss
2010 Ngô B C
2010 S Smirnov
2010 C Villani
2014 A Ávila
2014 M Bhargava
2014 M Hairer
2014 M Mirzakhani
2018 P Scholze
2018 A Figalli
2018 A Venkatesh
2018 C Birkar
2022 H Duminil-Copin
2022 J Huh
2022 J Maynard
2022 M Viazovska
2026 Yu Deng
2026 J Pardon
2026 J Tsimerman
2026 Hong Wang

More details of the Fields medals are available at the IMU web-site