Hong Wang, mathematician

Permanent Professor since 2025

A specialist in harmonic analysis, Hong Wang recently announced a solution to the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a longstanding open problem at the intersection of analysis and geometry.

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, Hong 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.

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