Issue #012 | The Storm Beneath a Fields Medal

Why Peking University Lost Control of a Success Story It Helped Create

09:00 New York · 14:00 London · 21:00 Beijing

In 2026, for the first time, two of the four recipients of the Fields Medal—the highest honour in mathematics—were Chinese nationals.[1] Both had entered Peking University in 2007 and later became classmates in its School of Mathematical Sciences.[2] Professor Hong Wang, together with Professor Joshua Zahl, proved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem that had challenged mathematicians for more than a century. She was also recognised for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including local smoothing and Fourier restriction.[3] Professor Yu Deng received the medal for his research in partial differential equations.[2]

After the awards were announced, institutions including Peking University[4], MIT[5], École Polytechnique[6], IHES[7] and New York University[8] publicly celebrated their respective connections to the laureates. Only Peking University’s message of congratulations quickly developed into a controversy on the Chinese internet, centred on whether the university was entitled to celebrate their success.[9]

Why did an institution that had genuinely contributed to its alumni’s mathematical formation nevertheless struggle to make its claim to their success feel legitimate?

The analysis that follows centres primarily on Professor Wang, whose interviews provide a substantially richer first-person account of her intellectual formation and mentoring relationships, and whose recollections became the principal source material cited in the controversy.

A story built from true fragments

In the story passed from person to person online, Professor Wang felt discouraged during her undergraduate years at Peking University; France was where she received support and developed confidence in mathematical research; and her American adviser allowed her to leave a problem unsolved and think slowly.[9] The story drew on Professor Wang’s recollection of Professor Yvan Martel at École Polytechnique, who made her realise that she did not have to work through every difficulty alone.[10] It also drew on her account of her doctoral adviser at MIT, Professor Larry Guth, who listened to ideas that were still unformed and respected her own path of reasoning.[1]

The conclusions drawn from these recollections included the claims that Peking University selected talent but did not cultivate it; that Professor Wang had endured so much in its meritocratic, competition-oriented and unsupportive environment that she politely used discouraged when she meant disgusted; that she could never have won the medal had she remained in China; and that Peking University had contributed nothing to her achievement.[9]

Many of these conclusions lack a rigorous logical basis. Some take Professor Wang’s words out of context or attribute details to the wrong stage of her life. For example, Professor Wang said that mathematics became difficult when she entered university, very different from the interest-led problems she had enjoyed as a child, and that it took her many years to learn. She did not say that this was Peking University’s fault.[11] Online, however, her comment was confidently interpreted as evidence of a problem with the university’s environment, and gradually drifted into a story in which Peking University had ignored a genius before she became famous and returned to claim the fruits of her success.[9]

What did Professor Wang experience?

Any account assembled from interviews is itself selective. The following chronology draws on the published interviews cited here and cannot replace Professor Wang’s own full account of her experience. Its purpose is narrower: to distinguish what the available sources support from the institutional judgements later built from them, and to examine how her recollections changed as they circulated in public.

Professor Wang’s parents gave her a family environment in which she was free to develop her interest in mathematics. At secondary school, when she demonstrated enthusiasm and knowledge in class, a classmate told her, “You are a girl. What are you trying to show off for?” Professor Wang wanted to transfer back to a school in her home town. Her teacher, Tang Nianhua, bought her a warm drink, talked with her and affirmed her ability, helping her recover from the bullying.[12]

Peking University provided intensive mathematical training and a group of exceptionally able peers.[13] It also provided student discussion seminars and a mechanism through which she could transfer into the mathematics department.[14]

École Polytechnique gave her support that helped her build confidence.[14] It also gave her room to explore architecture and step away temporarily from mathematics. Through that comparison, she confirmed her choice to return to mathematics.[3] In a reading course, Professor Martel told her to collect the difficulties she encountered and bring them to their next meeting, making her realise that she did not have to work everything out alone.[10] He later helped put her in touch with colleagues at MIT; around the end of her first master’s year, she spent several months there in Professor Guth’s research group.[14]

At MIT, Professor Guth remained patient with ideas that were not yet clear and did not rush to decide on her behalf whether they were right or wrong. This allowed Professor Wang gradually to form her own research judgements and helped her develop agency as a researcher.[1]

The story that Peking University made no contribution is therefore inaccurate. Professor Wang herself has warned that some of the stories circulating online are untrue. A more accurate account, based on her first-person interviews, is that different people and institutions performed different functions at different stages of her development.[10]

As biography, the online story is unreliable. As an institutional demand, however, it is revealing: its circulation shows that the public is redefining what a university must demonstrate before it is entitled to share in an alumnus’s success.

Why the story felt true

Across the public discussion, commenters repeatedly described experiences of their own: being continuously evaluated and compared; being required, within unequal power relationships, to obey an authority’s arrangements and commands, sometimes even to carry out personal tasks beyond the boundaries of academic work; being treated as a tool rather than respected as a person; having their intellectual work appropriated; and being subjected to personal insults and verbal bullying.[9]

These accounts cannot establish how widespread such experiences are, nor can they prove that Professor Wang encountered them at Peking University. What they reveal is the reservoir of lived and narrated distrust into which her story arrived. This helps explain how a story supported by incomplete evidence could nevertheless acquire such intense emotional credibility.

The controversy activated an existing suspicion of parts of mainland China’s academic environment and projected it onto Peking University.

Standardised examinations such as the zhongkao and gaokao have long carried an important claim to legitimacy: common, comparatively transparent criteria can weaken the power of wealth, personal connections and family background over educational opportunity. But the institutional capacities required to allocate scarce opportunities are not the same as those required to cultivate independent minds.

When the logic of selection travels beyond the gateway and becomes a routine feature of academic relationships, what can be measured and compared may displace forms of value that are harder to record: trust, encouragement, cooperation, respect and intellectual autonomy. Where these are not institutionally protected, their provision depends disproportionately on the character of individual teachers and supervisors.

Why Peking University became the proxy

The available record does not prove that relational support was absent at Peking University; however, it does show that such support is far less publicly legible. In Professor Wang’s interviews, the contributions of her secondary-school teacher and of the institutions and advisers she encountered in France and the United States tend to appear through particular people and relationships, and through acts of listening, waiting, allowing, helping and introducing. Peking University’s contribution appears mainly through training and the environment created by a group of mathematically outstanding peers.

This asymmetry may partly reflect the questions Professor Wang was asked and the different stages on which each interview concentrated. It cannot be used to infer the capacity of an entire university from the narrative detail of one person’s interviews. But it did shape how the university’s claim was received. Through the controversy, the public was asking loudly: before the world validated her, who made her feel seen, trusted and intellectually free?

Peking University became the proxy because it had a genuine connection to the two laureates while also representing the highest authority in China’s system of elite selection. The public was therefore not judging only what the university had done for two mathematicians. It was using their success to ask what the country’s best-resourced institutions do for talent before that talent becomes internationally undeniable.

The verdict

Peking University did help to create this success, but institutional credit does not arise automatically from an alumnus’s later achievement.

The public has begun to judge the relationship between an institution and the people it cultivates by asking whether the institution saw, respected and supported a person before that person became successful.

The difficulty of making such support visible is not unique to Peking University. Universities can readily document whom they admitted, what training they provided and what those people later produced. They are less able to make visible what happened during the years when a developing mind had produced nothing measurable: who helped them, who listened, who protected their autonomy and who allowed them to follow an uncertain path.

Sutong

The Velvet Scalpel

Notes

1. ChinaVenture (投中网), “王虹，慢慢想” (“Hong Wang: Think Slowly”; in Chinese), 27 July 2026.

2. The Intellectual (知识分子), “不出所料，北大校友王虹、邓煜同获菲尔兹奖｜附精彩对话” (“Peking University Alumni Hong Wang and Yu Deng Both Receive Fields Medals”; in Chinese), 23 July 2026.

3. Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine, “Living Fully in the Math World Means Threading the Needle”, 23 July 2026.

4. Peking University, “Two PKU Alumni Wang Hong and Deng Yu Have Been Awarded the 2026 Fields Medal”, 23 July 2026.

5. MIT Department of Mathematics, [“Two of the Four 2026 Fields Medalists Awarded to MIT Alums”](https://math.mit.edu/news/archive/#:~:text=News Archive * July 23%2C 2026. Two,advisor was Ankur Moitra). Congratulations to all!), 23 July 2026.

6. École Polytechnique, “Hong Wang, X 2010 and an École Polytechnique’s Honorary Doctorate Recipient, Is Awarded the 2026 Fields Medal”, 23 July 2026.

7. IHES, “Hong Wang, Permanent Professor at IHES, Awarded the 2026 Fields Medal”, 23 July 2026.

8. New York University, “NYU Professor Hong Wang Wins Fields Medal”, 23 July 2026.

9. The account of the public reaction draws on posts and comment threads reviewed by the author between 23 and 30 July 2026, including responses to Peking University’s Fields Medal announcement. These materials are used to identify recurring claims and sentiments, not as a representative sample, proof of prevalence or evidence of Wang’s own experience.

10. Han Yangmei, China Science Daily, “独家专访王虹：从北大数学系曾经的‘小透明’，到今天的菲尔兹奖得主” (“Exclusive Interview with Hong Wang: From an ‘Invisible’ Student in Peking University’s Mathematics Department to a Fields Medallist”; in Chinese), 24 July 2026.

11. École Polytechnique, “Three Minutes with Hong Wang (X2010), Fields Medal 2026”, video interview, 2026.

12. Guangxi Daily, “特稿｜王的猜想” (“Feature | Wang’s Conjecture”; in Chinese), 24 July 2026.

13. Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, “跟随自己的兴趣和感觉｜专访王虹校友” (“Follow Your Interests and Instincts: An Interview with Alumna Hong Wang”; in Chinese), 2023.

14. DeepTech, “王虹、邓煜获2026菲尔兹奖：两位北大同届生的数学之路” (“Hong Wang and Yu Deng Win 2026 Fields Medals: The Mathematical Paths of Two Members of Peking University’s 2007 Cohort”; in Chinese), 23 July 2026.