A Simple Curl Command Unveils the 2026 Fields Medal Leak, Spotlighting Two Peking University Alumni

The ICM 2026 website’s eventSnapshot API returned the complete dataset for the conference schedule without filtering out entries marked as hidden. Although the front‑end page hides these items, the raw JSON includes four records labeled "HIDDEN Fields Medal Lecture" with showOnAgenda set to false.

By issuing a single curl request to the API and searching for the keyword "HIDDEN", researchers uncovered the four concealed lecture entries. The four names listed are Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang.

Further examination of the same database revealed additional hidden fields, including the award presenters and winners of other prestigious prizes such as the Shayan Oveis Gharan (Shayan Oveis Gharan) award, the Graeme Segal prize, and the Yurii Nesterov prize.

After the leak became public, the ICM website briefly went offline; when it returned, the hidden entries had been removed, but the data had already been saved and screenshot. Prediction markets on Polymarket saw the probability of the four individuals winning surge above 98% within hours.

Wang Hong’s Academic Path

Born in 1991 in Guilin, Guangxi, Wang Hong entered Peking University in 2007 with a score of 653 on the national college entrance exam, initially joining the School of Earth and Space Sciences. She transferred to the School of Mathematical Sciences after one year, later studying in France at École Polytechnique and Paris‑Sud, earning an engineering diploma and a master’s in mathematics.

She pursued a Ph.D. at MIT under Larry Guth, completing it in 2019, and subsequently held positions at Princeton, UCLA, and NYU’s Courant Institute. In 2025 she became a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), one of only twelve lifetime mathematicians there, seven of whom have won the Fields Medal. In 2026 she also received the title of Silver Professor at NYU.

Her most notable contribution is the 2025 solution, with Joshua Zahl, of the three‑dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem that had challenged mathematicians for over a century across harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory. This breakthrough earned her the Salem Prize, the ICCM Mathematics Gold Medal, and the Ostrovskii Prize.

Yu Deng’s Academic Path

Born in 1989 in Shenzhen, Yu Deng followed a classic competition‑driven trajectory. He won a gold medal at the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad in high school, placed second on the national team, and earned a gold medal at the 47th International Mathematical Olympiad in 2006 (35/42 points, tied for sixth worldwide).

He entered Peking University via competition admission, studied there for about two years before transferring to MIT in 2009. In 2010 he became a Putnam Fellow, the highest honor in the U.S. undergraduate mathematics competition. After graduating from MIT in 2011, he pursued a Ph.D. at Princeton under Alexandru D. Ionescu, completing it in four years, and later completed a post‑doctoral fellowship at NYU’s Courant Institute before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago as a full professor.

Deng’s most influential work, co‑authored with Ma Xiao and Zaher Hani, solved the "narrow Hilbert’s sixth problem" by rigorously deriving the full logical chain from microscopic particle systems to the macroscopic Boltzmann equation.

Both mathematicians entered Peking University in the same year (2007) and will share the podium at the ICM 2026 in Philadelphia, marking the first time two Chinese scholars win the Fields Medal in the same year.

Historically, only five instances have seen two laureates from the same country in a single year, all from nations other than China. If confirmed, China will become the fifth country to achieve this distinction, joining the United States (twice), France, the United Kingdom, and Russia.

The leak, caused by a front‑end bug that exposed hidden schedule data, underscores the growing intersection of web security and academic news dissemination, while the achievements of Wang Hong and Yu Deng highlight the diverse pathways—high‑school competition versus standard university admission—that can lead to the highest honors in mathematics.