Meet Yu Deng, one of the recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals.
In 2021, inside a Korean fried-chicken stall in Providence, Rhode Island, mathematician Yu Deng found himself thinking about time. He and Zaher Hani had spent years studying turbulent waves, whose interactions multiply into increasingly tangled histories. The longer the waves evolved, the more unmanageable the mathematics became. Then, in the fried-chicken stall, Deng asked a question that sounded almost too simple to be of any use: “What if we try to divide long time intervals into short time intervals?”
That idea became the seed of a proof that closes one of mathematical physics's oldest gaps — the 125-year-old challenge, posed by David Hilbert, to connect Newton's laws of colliding particles with Boltzmann's statistical theory of gases and the fluid equations we use every day.
In July 2026, Deng received the Fields Medal for this work. Read the full story by Andrei Mihai of the proof — and the fried-chicken-stall moment that started it: How a Fried-Chicken Question Helped a Mathematician Cut Through Time (and Win a Fields Medal)
Image caption: 2026 Fields Medal recipient Yu Deng. Image credits: Badge / HLFF.