ICM 2026 Announces Fields Medal and Major IMU Award Winners

On July 23 (U.S. Eastern Time), the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2026 officially announced the recipients of the Fields Medal​, the IMU Abacus Medal, the Chern Medal Award, the IMU Gauss Prize, and the Leelavati Prize.

Fields Medal

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and exceptional promise for future accomplishments.

To be eligible, a candidate must not have turned 40 before January 1 of the year in which the Congress is held.

2026 Fields Medalist

Yu Deng is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal 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 Schrödinger dynamics.

John Pardon is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for his achievements in symplectic geometry, including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of Liouville 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 is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for his role in the vast extension of the scope of o-minimal techniques within arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, including the proof of Griffiths' conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps.

Hong Wang is awarded the 2026 Fields Medal 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.

Read more stories about the 2026 Fields Medalists.​

IMU Abacus Medal

The IMU Abacus Medal is awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding contributions to the mathematical aspects of information sciences, including:

All mathematical aspects of computer science, including complexity theory, logic of programming languages, analysis of algorithms, cryptography, computer vision, pattern recognition, information processing and modelling of intelligence, scientific computing and numerical analysis, computational aspects of optimization and control theory, and computer algebra.

As with the Fields Medal, recipients must not have turned 40 before January 1 of the Congress year.

2026 Abacus Medal

Shayan Oveis Gharan is awarded the 2026 IMU Abacus Medal for his landmark contributions to the theory of algorithms, taking the analysis of algorithms beyond combinatorics and probabilistic analysis into the theory of the geometry of polynomials and related topics. This theory has led to deeper understanding of distributions on spanning trees and matroid bases in general. Oveis Gharan’s work improved the approximation of the metric travelling salesperson problem, breaking the limit on the approximation factor in Christofides’ 3/2-algorithm from 50 years ago, and led to a revolution in the understanding of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms (proving the Mihail-Vazirani conjecture and giving a self-contained proof that resolved the strongest version of Mason's conjecture) through spectral independence.

Chern Medal Award

The Chern Medal Award is presented every four years during the International Congress of Mathematicians to honor individuals whose lifetime achievements represent the highest level of excellence in mathematics.

Established in 2010, the award consists of a medal and a US$500,000 prize. It is open to all living individuals, regardless of age or profession.

2026 Chern Medal Award

Graeme Segal is awarded the 2026 Chern Medal for his visionary mathematical insights that have had an enduring influence in a wide range of fields, including topology, mathematical physics, representation theory and category theory.

IMU Gauss Prize

First awarded in 2006, the IMU Gauss Prize recognizes mathematicians whose research has had a significant impact beyond mathematics itself, including applications in technology, business, and everyday life.

2026 IMU Gauss Prize

The Gauss Prize is awarded to Yurii Nesterov for his groundbreaking work on mathematical optimization that provided the theoretical foundation and algorithmic backbone for many numerical and data-driven fields, enabling practical computations that were previously too time-consuming to be feasible.

Leelavati Prize

Sponsored by Infosys, the Leelavati Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to increasing public appreciation and understanding of mathematics and its importance across diverse areas of human endeavor. The prize was first awarded in 2010.

2026 Leelavati Prize

Hannah Fry is one of the foremost global ambassadors for mathematical thinking. She has become a voice for mathematics that resonates far beyond the public audience normally interested in science communication. Through a wide range of media—including books, videos, and television programs—she has used outstanding creativity and originality to translate mathematics into a language of wonder and relevance for the public without diminishing its scope and importance.

Explore More from ICM 2026

2026 Fields Medal Winners Announced: Four Mathematicians Honored​

Where Have Fields Medalists Studied and Worked?​

The List of Speakers at ICM 2026​