A2 · Elementary
9 min
mathematicssciencegender equalityeducation
Third Woman in Sixty Years, and Nobody's Talking About It
Solo tres mujeres en sesenta años de matemáticas
The Fields Medal, arguably the hardest prize in the world to win, has four new laureates in 2026. Among them is Hong Wang, only the third woman to receive the honor in more than six decades of history.
El Premio Fields, el galardón más difícil de ganar en el mundo de las matemáticas, tiene cuatro nuevos ganadores en 2026. Entre ellos está Hong Wang, solo la tercera mujer en recibir este premio en más de seis décadas de historia.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| premio | prize, award | El Premio Fields es muy importante en matemáticas. |
| hace | ago (in time expressions) | Hace cuatro años, el congreso es en Helsinki. |
| modelo | role model, model | Hong Wang es un modelo para las chicas jóvenes. |
| frontera | border, boundary | Las matemáticas no tienen fronteras. |
| base | foundation, base | Las matemáticas son la base de la tecnología. |
They handed out what might be the hardest prize in the world to earn last week, in Philadelphia of all places, and I'll be honest: I had never heard of three of the four people who received it.
Es el Premio Fields.
It's the Fields Medal.
Es muy importante en matemáticas.
It's very important in mathematics.
Right, the Fields Medal.
And the thing is, most people outside mathematics have no idea this prize exists, which is strange because mathematically speaking it outranks the Nobel, at least in terms of what it signals about the person receiving it.
El Nobel no tiene matemáticas.
The Nobel doesn't include mathematics.
El Fields es diferente.
The Fields is different.
Exactly, there's no Nobel for mathematics, which is one of the great mysteries of the prize world.
So the Fields Medal fills that gap, except it comes with an extra constraint that makes it genuinely brutal: you have to be under forty years old when you receive it.
Menos de cuarenta años.
Under forty years old.
Es una regla muy estricta.
It's a very strict rule.
And it only comes around every four years, at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
So if you're thirty-nine and your work isn't quite there yet, that's it.
The window closes.
Cuatro años es mucho tiempo.
Four years is a long time.
Y poco tiempo también.
And also a short time.
That's a genuinely good way to put it.
So this year, 2026, the Congress met in Philadelphia, and four people won.
Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang.
And it's Hong Wang's name that's generating the most attention.
Ella es la tercera mujer.
She is the third woman.
Solo la tercera.
Only the third.
In sixty-plus years of the prize.
The first was Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014, then Maryna Viazovska in 2022, and now Wang.
Three women out of, let me think, something like sixty-four total laureates since 1936.
That number is stark.
Mirzakhani es muy famosa.
Mirzakhani is very famous.
Ella muere en 2017.
She died in 2017.
She died at forty.
Cancer.
Three years after she won the medal.
And I remember reading about her death and thinking, the mathematical community lost something that we will simply never know the shape of.
What she would have done in her fifties, her sixties.
Es muy triste.
It's very sad.
Ella trabaja en geometría.
She works in geometry.
Es genial.
She is a genius.
She worked on the geometry of surfaces, things that are almost impossible to visualize.
And she was Iranian, trained in Tehran, which added another dimension to why her story mattered.
She broke through walls that weren't only mathematical.
Hong Wang trabaja en análisis.
Hong Wang works in analysis.
Es diferente de Mirzakhani.
She is different from Mirzakhani.
Wang's area is harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory.
Which, if you're like me, means almost nothing on the surface.
But the practical implications run deep, especially for signal processing and, increasingly, for the mathematics that underpins machine learning.
Las matemáticas son la base de la tecnología.
Mathematics is the foundation of technology.
Sin matemáticas, no hay computadoras.
Without mathematics, there are no computers.
This is the thing that gets lost when people separate science and technology from pure mathematics.
The people who developed the theory of Fourier transforms in the nineteenth century had no idea their work would one day be essential to MRI machines, to digital audio, to GPS.
You never know where the pure stuff lands.
Exacto.
Exactly.
La idea de hoy es la tecnología de mañana.
Today's idea is tomorrow's technology.
Now, the other three winners.
John Pardon is American, based at Princeton, and he works in geometric topology, which is the study of shapes and spaces in ways that make your brain do something uncomfortable.
He solved problems in symplectic geometry that had been sitting there for decades.
Pardon es joven.
Pardon is young.
Tiene menos de cuarenta años, claro.
He's under forty, of course.
By definition, yes.
They all are.
Jacob Tsimerman is Canadian, works in number theory and arithmetic geometry.
This is the territory of prime numbers, of equations with no solutions, of questions that look simple and turn out to be cavernous.
His work connects number theory to the theory of differential equations in ways that apparently surprised even specialists.
Los números primos son fascinantes.
Prime numbers are fascinating.
Son un misterio muy antiguo.
They are a very old mystery.
Ancient, really.
Two and a half thousand years old as a mathematical obsession.
And then Yu Deng, who works on fluid dynamics and partial differential equations.
That's closer to physics in some ways, questions about how fluids move, turbulence, the equations that describe the weather.
El tiempo del clima es muy difícil de calcular.
Weather is very difficult to calculate.
Los matemáticos trabajan en eso.
Mathematicians work on that.
And it matters more and more, given where climate modeling is going.
But let me come back to the gender question, because I don't want to move past it too fast.
Three women in sixty years.
At what point does that become an indictment of the field rather than just a statistical curiosity?
Es un problema histórico.
It's a historical problem.
Las mujeres no tienen acceso antes.
Women don't have access before.
Right, and that's the honest answer.
For most of the twentieth century, women were simply not in the rooms where this kind of mathematical work happened.
They weren't admitted to the universities, they weren't funded, they weren't taken seriously by their advisors.
The pipeline was poisoned before it started.
Ahora hay más mujeres en matemáticas.
Now there are more women in mathematics.
Pero todavía son pocas.
But there are still few.
And the Fields Medal is a lagging indicator.
The work that gets recognized in 2026 was done years earlier, which means the pipeline problem from twenty years ago still shows up in today's numbers.
The fix, if there is one, takes generations.
Hong Wang es un modelo para las chicas jóvenes.
Hong Wang is a role model for young girls.
Eso es muy importante.
That is very important.
Mirzakhani said something like that, actually.
She said she hoped girls in Iran and around the world could see that mathematics wasn't a closed door.
And then she died at forty and that conversation was cut short.
Wang picks it back up.
La historia importa.
History matters.
Ver a alguien como tú, eso da fuerza.
Seeing someone like you, that gives strength.
The Congress being in Philadelphia is also interesting, by the way.
The ICM rotates around the world.
It was in Rio in 2018, in Helsinki in 2022, virtually because of the war in Ukraine, and now it lands in the United States for the first time in decades.
There's something fitting about a prize for the most universal of disciplines arriving in a country that's currently having a very loud argument about whether expertise matters.
Las matemáticas no tienen fronteras.
Mathematics has no borders.
Los números son universales.
Numbers are universal.
That's the optimistic reading, and I'll take it.
The four winners are American, Canadian, and Chinese, working at institutions in the US and Canada.
The International Congress brought them to Philadelphia and said: this is what human intelligence looks like at its best.
Y hace cuatro años, en Helsinki, otros matemáticos ganan.
And four years ago, in Helsinki, other mathematicians won.
Y así siempre.
And so it always goes.
Wait, you said something there, 'hace cuatro años.' I want to come back to that in a second, because the way Spanish handles time like that still catches me off guard.
But first: what's your overall read on this?
Does the Fields Medal feel like it matters to people outside mathematics, or is it always going to be a thing the field celebrates by itself?
La gente no conoce el premio.
People don't know the prize.
Pero eso no importa.
But that doesn't matter.
El trabajo es real.
The work is real.
Fair.
The GPS in your phone doesn't care whether you know who developed the mathematics behind it.
The work exists regardless.
But I do think it matters that Hong Wang's name circulates, that people hear it, that a girl somewhere who is quietly very good at mathematics reads this news.
Sí.
Yes.
Y 'hace cuatro años' es una forma especial en español.
And 'hace cuatro años' is a special form in Spanish.
There it is.
Because in English I'd say 'four years ago,' right?
Subject, verb, time marker.
But in Spanish you flipped it.
You led with 'hace.' Walk me through that.
'Hace' significa 'ago' en inglés.
'Hace' means 'ago' in English.
'Hace diez años' es 'ten years ago.'
'Hace diez años' is 'ten years ago.'
So 'hace' is doing the heavy lifting all by itself.
It's not 'before' or 'past' or anything complicated.
Just 'hace,' and then the amount of time.
'Hace un año,' 'hace dos semanas,' 'hace mucho tiempo.'
Exacto.
Exactly.
Es simple.
It's simple.
'Hace mucho tiempo' es 'a long time ago.'
'Hace mucho tiempo' is 'a long time ago.'
Which means every fairy tale in Spanish starts with 'hace mucho tiempo' instead of 'once upon a time.' I like that better, actually.
It's more honest.
It happened.
It was a specific amount of time ago.
We just don't know how much.
Sí, Fletcher.
Yes, Fletcher.
Las matemáticas y los cuentos.
Mathematics and fairy tales.
Todo conecta.
Everything connects.