Hong Wang joins IHES as Permanent Professor of Mathematics

Press release – 21 May 2025

IHES is delighted to announce that Hong Wang will join the Institute as a Permanent Professor of Mathematics, effective September 1, 2025.

Dr. Wang’s appointment will be a joint position with the Department of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, a longstanding academic partner of IHES, where she will serve as Professor of Mathematics.

Originally from Guangxi, China, Hong Wang earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2011. She then moved to France, where she graduated from École Polytechnique (Cycle Ingénieur polytechnicien, X2010) and obtained a master’s degree in mathematics at Université Paris-Saclay in 2014. During her PhD at MIT, completed in 2019 under the supervision of Larry Guth, she began working on problems in Fourier analysis. Following a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she became Assistant Professor at UCLA in 2021, before joining the Courant Institute in 2023.

In 2022, Hong Wang was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for “advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and related problems.” More recently, Dr. Wang and her co-author Joshua Zahl distinguished themselves by announcing the solution to the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a longstanding open problem at the intersection of harmonic analysis and geometry.

At IHES, Hong Wang will carry forward the Institute’s tradition of excellence in analysis and geometry, following in the footsteps of former Permanent Professors Jean Bourgain and Mikhail Gromov. In fact, Dr. Wang has used decoupling techniques introduced by Bourgain and Ciprian Demeter in the 2010s in her own research, and has had multiple interactions with Misha Gromov during her time at NYU—where Gromov is also affiliated with the Courant Institute since the 1990’s.

Hong Wang comments: “I have maintained many ties with the French mathematical community since my time as a master’s student at Université Paris-Saclay, and it is both a privilege and an honor to join IHES, where so many of my mathematical heroes have worked and proven great theorems.”

Dr. Wang’s joint appointment between IHES and NYU also reaffirms the historical academic ties between IHES and the United States, as emphasized by Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of IHES: “IHES has always maintained a strong relationship with the American scientific community. From our earliest years, many of our Permanent Professors have held joint appointments or collaborations with American institutions. This partnership with NYU is a natural continuation of that history and a testament to our shared commitment to excellence in fundamental research.”

Russel E. Caflisch, Director of the Courant Institute, concludes: “Hong Wang has established herself as a remarkable mathematician during her career so far, and her recent work solving the Kakeya Conjecture in 3D brought incredible excitement to our academic community. The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she is a tenured member of the faculty, is pleased to partner with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) on a joint position for Professor Wang. We hope that this international collaboration will enable her enormous talents to lead to even more exciting breakthroughs in the future.”

Photo credit: Chris Peus/IHES