The Chinese mathematician Hong Wang is the co-winner of the 2026 Fields Medal (the equivalent of the Nobel prize for the discipline). The Chinese mathematician Hong Wang, a researcher at the Alexander Grothendieck Laboratory at the IHES institute for scientific studies, has just been awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for solving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, alongside Joshua Zahl. It was at that time, thanks in particular to her thesis supervisor Larry Guth, that Wang discovered the Kakeya conjecture. If the solutions to the Kakeya problem were found long ago, what work is being recognised by the Fields Medal? The Kakeya conjecture is connected to other important conjectures or questions from various fields of mathematics, in particular harmonic analysis and arithmetic combinatorics.