Yu Deng

Deng was born in 1989, and shortly afterwards his family moved to Shenzhen. In 2001 he entered China’s national professional Go qualification tournament; needing one win in his final three games, he lost all three and then turned his focus to mathematics.⁠[1]

In 2006, at 16, Deng represented China at the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a gold medal.⁠[2]

Deng attended Peking University from September 2007 to June 2009, earned a B.S. in mathematics from MIT in 2011 and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 2015.⁠[3]

At MIT he became a Putnam Fellow in the 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.⁠[2]

His doctoral adviser was Alexandru D. Ionescu.⁠[4]

From 2018 to 2024 Deng was on the faculty of USCUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, including as an assistant professor.⁠[5]

Before that he was a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 2015 to 2018. In September 2024 he joined the University of Chicago as an associate professor, becoming a professor in June 2025.⁠[3]

The International Mathematical Union awarded Deng a 2026 Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.⁠[6]

The medals were announced on July 23, 2026, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia.⁠[2]

On September 11, 2026, Deng was one of 25 initial signatories, all Fields Medallists, of the declaration “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” which argued that AI companies’ push to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics and to the mathematical community.⁠[7]

On October 25, 2026, Deng spoke by video at a forum held by Zhishifenzi and Saixiansheng about OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s October 6 release of 722 AI-generated mathematical manuscripts, saying that an AI that proves a major result should publish its chain of thought.⁠[8]

He criticized the company for publishing chains of thought for very few of its proofs, mostly giving anti-distillation as the reason, and proposed open-source mathematical models under the mathematical community’s control.⁠[9]

Deng’s research covers topics including the probabilistic theory of PDEs, wave turbulence and kinetic theory. His paper with Zaher Hani, “Full derivation of the wave kinetic equation,” appeared in Inventiones Mathematicae in 2023, and his paper with Hani and Xiao Ma, “Long time derivation of Boltzmann equation from hard sphere dynamics,” is to appear in the Annals of Mathematics.⁠[10]