Chinese math prodigy Wang Hong lands NYU's most prestigious professorship at 35

Wang Hong, a Chinese mathematician who solved a century-old geometry problem in 2025, has been named a Silver Professor at New York University.

NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences appointed Wang, 35, to the chair in April, alongside two other professors. The Silver chair is the most prestigious named professorship NYU offers its faculty.

The professorship was endowed through a 2002 bequest from Julius Silver, an attorney and 1922 NYU graduate. It is awarded for research distinction and a commitment to undergraduate teaching, the university says, and is capped at 75 chairs across all faculties.

Wang, born in Guilin in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, entered Peking University in 2007 when she was 16 years old through its School of Earth and Space Sciences, then switched to mathematics, graduating in 2011.

By 2014, she had earned an engineering degree from France's École Polytechnique and a master's from Université Paris-Sud.

She completed her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 under Larry Guth, then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

She joined the University of California, Los Angeles as an assistant professor in 2021 and moved to NYU's Courant Institute in 2023.

She also holds a permanent professorship at France's Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, which she took up in September 2025.

Chinese mathematician Wang Hong, recipient of the 2025 Salem Prize. Photo courtesy of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques

Wang's best-known achievement came in February 2025, when she and Joshua Zahl, then at the University of British Columbia, posted a 127-page paper resolving the three-dimensional case of the Kakeya conjecture.

The question, first posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917, had stood unsolved for more than a century. In its simplest form, the problem asks for the smallest region in which an infinitely thin needle can be turned to point in every possible direction.

Mathematicians had settled the two-dimensional version decades ago, but the three-dimensional case had remained open.

Terence Tao, the Australian-American mathematician and 2006 Fields Medalist, flagged the preprint on his blog within days of its appearance.

Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, told Quanta Magazine the result was "a once-in-a-century kind of result."

The conjecture reaches beyond pure geometry, with close ties to deeper questions in harmonic analysis and number theory.

The South China Morning Post described the proof as a breakthrough with potential applications in imaging, cryptography and wireless communication.

Wang works at the intersection of Fourier analysis and geometric measure theory.

Her work has drawn a run of major prizes. In April she received the 2026 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and a 2026 Clay Research Award, shared with Zahl and two other collaborators.

The honors have placed Wang among the frequently named contenders for the 2026 Fields Medal, often called mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

The award goes to mathematicians under 40 and will next be presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, which runs July 23 to 30.

In the medal's nine-decade history, only two women have won it: Maryam Mirzakhani of Iran in 2014 and Maryna Viazovska of Ukraine in 2022.