Clay Research Awards 2026

IHES warmly congratulates the recipients of the 2026 Clay Research Awards, several of whom have close ties to the Institute.

A Clay Research Award has been awarded to Tuomas Orponen (Jyväskylä), Pablo Shmerkin (UBC), Hong Wang (IHES and New York University), and Joshua Zahl (Nankai) in recognition of their remarkable work on geometric problems in harmonic analysis, culminating in the proof of the Furstenberg set conjecture in the plane and the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. IHES is delighted to count Hong Wang among its Permanent Professors and to welcome Pablo Shmerkin to the Institute at the end of May.

A Clay Research Award has also been awarded to Robert Burklund (Copenhagen), Jeremy Hahn (MIT), Ishan Levy (IAS and Clay Mathematics Institute), and Tomer Schlank (Chicago) for their remarkable construction of counterexamples to Ravenel’s Telescope Conjecture. Tomer Schlank was a lecturer at the scientific conference celebrating the inauguration of the Jean-Pierre Bourguignon Chair at IHES in January 2024, where he delivered a lecture entitled Stable Homotopy Group, Higher Algebra, and the Telescope Conjecture.

A further Clay Research Award has been awarded to Yu Deng (Chicago) and Zaher Hani (Michigan) for their remarkable derivation of the Boltzmann equation over long timescales, starting from a system of hard spheres. Yu Deng gave a seminar at IHES on April 10, 2026, entitled Recent Progress on Probabilistic Theories of Parabolic and Dispersive Equations. Furthermore, the derivation of the Boltzmann equation over long timescales was discussed in a Cours de l’IHES series given by Laure Saint-Raymond, Permanent Professor of Mathematics at IHES, in February 2025.

IHES is proud to celebrate these achievements, to count several laureates among its collaborators and visitors, and to continue fostering the exchanges from which such advances emerge.