Two Chinese Women Share Mathematics’ “Oscars”: Wang Hong (王虹) and Tang Yunqing (唐云清) Among New Horizons Prize Winners

Breakthroughs at the frontier

The Breakthrough Prize’s New Horizons in Mathematics awards this year went to four young researchers — and two of the four are Chinese women: Wang Hong (王虹) of New York University and Tang Yunqing (唐云清) of UC Berkeley. It has been reported that Wang’s 2025 paper, coauthored with Joshua Zahl, resolved the three‑dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem that has vexed analysts and geometers for more than a century. It has been reported that Tang, together with Vesselin Dimitrov, proved the unbounded denominators conjecture for modular forms, a number‑theory advance described as the field’s most significant breakthrough in 45 years.

Who they are and why it matters

Wang, born in 1991 in Guangxi, accelerated through school, entered Peking University at 16 and later trained at École Polytechnique, Paris‑Sud, and MIT (PhD under Larry Guth). She held posts at the Institute for Advanced Study and UCLA before joining NYU’s Courant Institute and holding a chair at France’s IHÉS. Her work spans harmonic analysis, PDEs and geometric measure theory — from local smoothing and Furstenberg sets to the Kakeya problem — and it has been reported that colleagues consider her Kakeya resolution one of the top mathematical achievements of the century.

A long‑stalled front reopened

Tang and Dimitrov’s result touches modular forms, objects central to modern number theory and arithmetic geometry. Reportedly, their proof breaks a 45‑year impasse in the area — a milestone often compared in historical significance to Roger Apéry’s famous irrationality proof — and promises downstream implications across automorphic forms and arithmetic geometry. Vesselin Dimitrov’s broader record, and collaborations cited in the prize citation, connect deep techniques in geometry and analysis that helped make this advance possible.

Prize, context and the bigger picture

The New Horizons awards are part of the wider Breakthrough Prize program often dubbed the “Oscars of science.” This year’s total prize pool was about $18.75 million, with several $3 million awards in mathematics and physics and multiple life‑science prizes; the foundation has paid out more than $340 million since inception. Beyond individual acclaim, these awards highlight China’s growing imprint on global STEM talent and the rising visibility of women in elite mathematical research — at a time when scientific collaboration and competition increasingly sit alongside geopolitical tensions over technology and talent flows.