19 ms·
Fields Medals 2026
- yanhangyhy 2mo agoYu Deng is more famous now in china because he loves Lesbian fan fiction.
- Version467 2mo agoCan you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.
- raincole 2mo agoHe once asked on zhihu (chinese quora) for recommendations of yuri (~= anime lesbian) fanfiction. Under his real name.
- hnfong 2mo agoNot only that. https://www.quantamagazine.org/yu-deng-wins-the-fields-medal-2026-for-his-work-on-the-random-data-problem-20260723/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/yu-deng-wins-the-fields-medal... > For comfort, Deng turned to manga. “I remember him at Courant. He was always holding a manga,” said Jalal Shatah, a professor there who formerly chaired the math department. Deng particularly liked stories about deep friendship and romance and found himself drawn to a genre known as yuri, which focuses on those kinds of relationships between women — stories that “feel nice and warm and beautiful,” as he put it. They helped him be kinder to himself, “more comfortable with life.” ---- Note that while the description "anime lesbian" might sound weird to western audiences, within asian nerd subcultures it's relatively a common thingy.
- rahimnathwani 2mo agoThe winners were inadvertently announced early: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905091
- num42 2mo agoCongrats to the winners! I’m not sure how accurate this prediction is, but 2026 may be the last time pure humans win the Fields Medal. By 2030, AI could be a coauthor on many winning results. With recent news about LLMs solving major conjectures, winning IMO gold medals, and so much rapid progress, a lot is happening.
- Laurel1234 2mo ago[flagged]
- kylecazar 2mo agoDo humans win Fields medals for formatting and calculation?
- Laurel1234 2mo agoPython does all kinds of wondrous things
- tocs3 2mo agoShould we be handing out Fields medal to I don't know, maybe. I would not put Clankers on the same level (or category / level of importance) as people but if they produce the work maybe they should get the credit.
- hooloovoo_zoo 2mo agoTool-assisted proofs typically already get a description of the tool usage. Even if one wanted to start giving authorship credit to llms, they’re too non-atomic (did it have web search, which mcp?, etc.)
- tocs3 2mo agoNot trying to delving into a deep philosophical question here but... I asked chatgpt to write a poem about my mothers dog a while back. It spit out a poem that my mother likes and keeps around. When asked, I say chatgpt wrote it. If I asked chatgpt for a proof of the Goldbach Conjecture and it spit out a verifiable proof, I think I would go ahead and give chatgpt credit. Not that I think it is likely. It would be more of some ability (like a robot end effector is able to hold an egg) and monkeys at typewriters. Maybe not Fields Medal worthy, but worthy of some credit.
- unethical_ban 2mo agoReading the descriptions of their work makes me think of magic. It's an understanding of the principles of math and physics at a level above almost everyone on the planet - these are modern wizards.
- vonneumannstan 2mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway_7274 2mo agoThis Fox has a longing for grapes: He jumps, but the bunch still escapes. So he goes away sour; And, 'tis said, to this hour Declares that he's no taste for grapes.
- lioeters 2mo agoThe fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain The tempting clusters were too high to gain; Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile, And cried, 'They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.'
- leonvoss 2mo agoSo now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones. "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child. "Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another. "But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
- rvz 2mo agoWell deserved. Congratulations to them!
- siva7 2mo ago"harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions." I'm not sure there is another profession in the world where it's impossible to explain to a layman on what the winners of their most prestigious award have worked on.
- frakt0x90 2mo agoI bet she could do it. Maybe not in a sentence, but at least the Kakeya problem is easy to understand, so maybe these other things would be explainable by an expert. I would like to see them try at least! fwiw, I feel the same way about biology "Lysing action of the (1,2)b-carotene receptive encephalopathy pathway" type shit.
- Onavo 2mo ago> Lysing action of the (1,2)b-carotene receptive encephalopathy pathway High school biology is enough to get a vague idea of this though.
- nerdsniper 2mo agoRight. With a college degree, I understand most of these words. I don’t have a clue about the impact of the research or how it fits into the corpus, but I understand the gist of the article title. Despite my degree being in engineering, which involved 4 semesters of calculus, and 3 other semesters of math, (7 total) I have absolutely no fucking clue what’s going on in the Fields Medal description above. It’s only barely more intelligible than if it had been written in Chinese (which I truly cannot read at all). I genuinely don’t understand it at all. Even words that I think I recognize like “harmonic” or “geometric” are useless to me because the actual terms are “harmonic analysis” and “geometric measure theory” and I have 0% clue what those are. I don’t have to google any of the words in the example biology title.
- mkagenius 2mo agoOne was IMO gold medal winner as well.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mauriziocalo 2mo ago*Two IMO gold medal winners. Three ISO gold medal winners. Six ISO gold medals collectively :) - Yu Deng: IMO gold [1] - Jacob Tsimerman: 2x IMO gold [2] - John Pardon: 3x IOI gold [3] Fun fact: Tsimerman and Deng both overlapped with Peter Scholze (another Fields Medal recipient) at the IMO [1] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/8824/ https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/8824/ [2] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/7387/ https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/7387/ [3] https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/1141 https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/1141
- hackandthink 2mo agoScary stuff from one of the winners: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence" (Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369
- sirbutters 2mo agoJust by reading the abstract it's terrifying.
- gizajob 2mo agoThis is a piece of sci-fi formatted with LaTeX so it looks like philosophy.
- yewenjie 2mo agoDoes anyone know if Tsimerman talked about AI extinction risk at other places? Critch has worked long-term in the field (MIRI, CHAI) but I was surprised to see this colab.
- lhd1 2mo agothey are friends according to https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202607/noti3372/noti3372.html https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202607/noti3372/noti337...
- energy123 2mo agoJacob Tsimerman believes that AI will be better than human mathematicians within 2 years. We should not be surprised if AI solves the Millenium problems very soon and advances to a level that is barely comprehensible, or even incomprehensible, to the best humans. We can expect this not by curve fitting to recent progress but by reasoning from first principles about where the progress has come from (synthetic data, non-human corpus) that has no obvious upper bound on capabilities.
- WarmWash 2mo agoThe obvious and primary application will not be on showy millennium problems or long sought conjectures, but on optimizations and breakthroughs surrounding transformers.
- reindeer2 2mo ago[flagged]
- codedump 2mo agoHong Wang was the outlier among the four winners. She was not a traditional mathematical genius. She never participated in any mathematics competitions. Her major when she entered Peking University was not mathematics. During her master's studies in Paris, she even considered changing her major to study architecture.
- aureate 2mo agoIMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians. Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
- torginus 2mo ago> Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic Oddly. specific. Sorry, I don't get the reference, could you please tell me what/who does that refer to (which fanfic and person, and why said person and fact is relevant to this question)
- p_l 2mo agoThe quote I've seen was that Yu Deng dedicated part of his success to reading yuri (lesbian themed) manga.
- aureate 2mo agoIt was a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031519. Not a topic I know anything about.
- torginus 2mo agoPeople often bring up Palmer Luckey's (CEO of Anduril) old tweets about anime. Respect to the guy, he still hasn't deleted them.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tw1984 2mo ago4 winners, 3 can speak Chinese.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]