2026 Clay Research Awards Announced

On April 14, 2026, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the recipients of the 2026 Clay Research Awards. The awards recognize three distinct groups for a total of ten scholars for their groundbreaking achievements. Among the laureates are two Chinese mathematicians: Hong Wang and Yu Deng.

Orponen, Shmerkin, Wang, and Zahl

A Clay Research Award is made to Tuomas Orponen (Jyväskylä), Pablo Shmerkin (UBC), Hong Wang (IHES and NYU), and Joshua Zahl (Nankai). They are honored for their remarkable work on geometric problems in harmonic analysis, leading to the proof of the Furstenberg set conjecture in the plane and the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions.

These results build on a new set of tools for multiscale analysis developed by these four mathematicians (and some others) over many papers. Older work in the field often described the geometry of a set in Euclidean space using just one number, such as the Hausdorff dimension of the set. Instead, the new work considers detailed information about the spacing of the set at each scale. Different spacing scenarios are exploited in different ways.

Burklund, Hahn, Levy, and Schlank

A Clay Research Award is made to Robert Burklund (Copenhagen), Jeremy Hahn (MIT), Ishan Levy (IAS and CMI), and Tomer Schlank (Chicago). They are recognized for their construction of counterexamples to Ravenel's "Telescope Conjecture," the last open conjecture from Ravenel’s visionary paper “Localization with respect to certain periodic homology theories.”.

In one version, the telescope conjecture postulates an upper bound on the growth rate of the chromatic layers of the stable homotopy groups of spheres. The work of Burklund, Hahn, Levy and Schlank is the crest of a revolutionary new wave in K-theoretic techniques, to which they have each, independently, contributed. Their counterexamples imply that the p-rank of the stable homotopy groups of spheres grows faster than expected, and contains a proliferation of elements that are unaccountable by any prior understanding of the subject. This is a milestone achievement.

Deng and Hani

A Clay Research Award is made to Yu Deng (Chicago) and Zaher Hani (Michigan). Together with co-author Xiao Ma, they are honored for the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation for long times, starting from a microscopic system of hard spheres.

The result involves an exceptional mastery in combinatorics and in designing algorithms in extremely intricate models, and is a breakthrough in the field, 50 years after Lanford’s seminal result for short times, and more than 150 years after Boltzmann’s long-debated theory.