Support us Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng are Field Medal winners. Image: X Screengrab When Hong Wang and Yu Deng received Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia on July 23, they became the first citizens of the People’s Republic of China to hold mathematics’ highest honor in its 90-year history. Wang is also only the third woman ever to receive it, after Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska. Both facts are worth celebrating without qualification. What follows the celebration, though, is a question that neither triumphalism nor skepticism answers well: what, exactly, does a Fields Medal measure? Not the present, for a start. Prizes in fundamental science are like light from distant stars: by the time the signal reaches us, the source has changed. Any government reading this year’s medals as a real-time report card on its current science policy is reading the wrong instrument. The reflexive framing is a national scoreboard. Yet the biographies resist it. Wang and Deng entered Peking University in the same 2007 cohort; Wang then studied in France before earning her doctorate at MIT, and Deng transferred to MIT in 2009 before completing a PhD at Princeton.
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