The mathematician Hong Wang is one of four recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals, awards often called “math’s Nobel Prize.” Wang and Deng represent the prizes’ only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982. Wang’s Fields Medal, he says, “is well deserved.” Wang remembers being excited when Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a Fields medal in 2014. John PardonIf a Fields Medal is an award for the mathematically precocious, it’s hard to imagine a better fit than Pardon.