Peking University, May 6, 2026: The winners of the 2026 Breakthrough Prize—often referred to as the “Oscars of science”—were officially announced in April, and three Peking University alumni were among them. Wang Hong and Tang Yunqing were awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, while Zhang Mingjia received the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize.


Wang Hong was recognized for her work in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory, including the local smoothing conjecture, Furstenberg set conjecture, and the Kakeya conjecture.

At the 10th International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, Wang described the process behind proving the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture. What began as an attempt to rigorously examine ideas proposed by Terence Tao gradually evolved into a full proof as methods matured and related problems were resolved. For Wang, the journey was not marked by sudden breakthroughs, but by sustained, careful work over time.


Tang Yunqing was honored for her work in Diophantine geometry, including the proof of the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture and new irrationality results for special values of Dirichlet L-series (both joint with Frank Calegari).

Though widely regarded as one of the most demanding branches in mathematics, number theory drew Tang to its depths. Through persistent effort, Tang and her collaborators made major breakthroughs in this field. Besides the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, Tang also won the 2026 AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory together with Frank Calegari and Vesselin Dimitrov, recognizing their research for solving a half-century old conjecture “using methods that surprised experts in the field”.



Zhang Mingjia received the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for her contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties. Her research focuses on the Langlands program and p-adic Hodge theory, areas at the forefront of contemporary mathematical research. Zhang proved herself a math prodigy as early as middle school, when she secured admission to PKU without examination for her excellent performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad. She worked at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), where she was appointed a von Neumann Fellow — an honor awarded to a select group of early-career scholars.


About the Breakthrough Prize
Established in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize recognizes outstanding contributions in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. In addition to its main awards, it also includes the New Horizons Prizes, the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, and the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize, which honor early-career researchers who have made significant advances in their fields.

Written by: Zhang Wenjun
Edited by: An Bingjie, Chen Shizhuo
Source: PKU WeChat (Chinese)