China's First Fields Medalists: Wang Hong and Deng Yu

Hey Sarah, welcome back to "Learn English with Podcasts"! Big news from the math world this week. Two Chinese mathematicians just won the Fields Medal.

It's basically the Nobel Prize of mathematics. It's given every four years to mathematicians under forty years old. It started in 1936, and it's considered the highest honor in math.

Yes. And here's what makes this year historic. For the first time ever, two Chinese mathematicians won in the same year. Their names are Wang Hong and Deng Yu.

That's the interesting part. Their paths to the prize are completely different. Wang Hong grew up in a small town in Guangxi. Deng Yu grew up in the big city of Shenzhen. But here's a fun fact. They were actually classmates at Peking University. They both entered in 2007.

She was born in 1991 in Guilin. Her parents were both teachers at a local middle school. When she was four years old, she was badly burned by hot water on her right arm. She spent years recovering in hospitals.

Her parents didn't want her to fall behind. They brought school textbooks to her hospital bed. She studied there and finished first grade while recovering. By the time she was ready for regular school, she skipped two grades. That's why she was always two or three years younger than her classmates.

It was. But she developed a love for thinking. When she was five or six, she found math puzzles in the back of a textbook called "Think About It." She loved solving them. She said it felt fun and interesting.

Yes, but she wasn't a typical prodigy. She didn't win big math competitions. In high school, she ranked around one hundred in her grade. By her final year, she made it to the top ten. She got into Peking University at just sixteen years old.

She was placed in Earth and Space Sciences, not math. From day one, she planned to transfer. It took a lot of hard work. She studied two programs at the same time and even taught herself one course. She finally transferred in her second year.

Not at all. She said university math was completely different from high school. In her class, half the students were math competition champions. She called herself a "small transparent" someone nobody noticed.

Right. Even her professor later admitted she wasn't the brightest star in the class. But she had something special. She loved the subject, and she never gave up. Her mother once said, "Getting into Peking University isn't success yet."

She went to France for her master's. She almost quit math and tried architecture for a month. But she realized she wanted the freedom to build her own ideas. Math gave her that freedom. So she went to MIT for her PhD.

Yes, Larry Guth. He was patient and encouraging. He let her think through problems at her own pace. That's when everything clicked.

Very different. He was born in Shenzhen in 1989. His father had a computer science background. Every weekend, his parents took him hiking. Along the way, his father would turn math problems into fun puzzles. That's how Deng Yu fell in love with math.

Definitely. By age five or six, he was reading medical textbooks from his family's bookshelf. He would ask adults about anatomy questions. He was clearly special.

From first grade, his teachers noticed his talent. His math teacher did something unusual. Instead of making him follow the regular curriculum, she let him think slowly, skip routine homework, and even let him play Go instead of doing math exercises.

Yes. Deng Yu was actually a competitive Go player. He joined his school's Go team in first grade and won many city and provincial awards. He almost became a professional Go player. He only lost one game away from the professional level.

Exactly. In middle school, he entered one of Shenzhen's top schools. By the end of junior high, he had already learned most of high school math. When he tried a college entrance exam math paper, he scored at least 130 out of 150.

In 2006, at just sixteen, he represented China at the International Math Olympiad and won a gold medal. He entered Peking University in 2007. His classmates called him "God Deng." He later transferred to MIT, won the Putnam Fellowship, and got his PhD from Princeton.

But both of them ended up at the same place: the Fields Medal. That's what makes their story so powerful.

Wang Hong proved the Kakeya Conjecture in three dimensions. It's a problem open for over a hundred years. It's about how much space you need to turn a line around in every direction. Without her proof, three other major conjectures would have been impossible.

He solved a special case of Hilbert's Sixth Problem. This connects the microscopic world of particles to the macroscopic world of fluids. Think of it like proving that the laws of physics at the smallest scale match the laws we see in everyday life.

You know what the funny thing is? Wang Hong said when she first heard about the Fields Medal, she thought it might be a scam email. She spent time checking if it was real before she believed it.

Ha! That's so humble. And now she's one of only three women in history to win this prize.

Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time on "Learn English with Podcasts."