Mathematicians win top prize after solving century's-old problems

Two Chinese win world's top Maths prize for solving century's-old problemsImage source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng are China's first Fields Medal recipientsByJoel GuintoPublished15 minutes agoTwo Chinese academics have won the world's top prize for mathematics for the first time, according to state media. Chinese mathematicians Hong Wang and Yu Deng won alongside John Pardon from the US and Jacon Tsimerman from Canada. They each won 15,000 Canadian dollars ($10,500; £8,000).Wang won for solving a problem that has baffled mathematicians for more than a century. The 35-year-old, who teaches in the US and France, is only the third woman to receive the honour.The Fields Medal, regarded as the Nobel prize equivalent for mathematics, was handed out on Thursday in the US as human computations are increasingly challenged by AI.Together with her colleague, Josh Zahl, Wang answered a question posed by Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1917: If you rotate a pencil so as to turn it completely around, what is the smallest area it sweeps out?Wang and Zahl analysed the problem on the assumption that the pencil was floating in a three-dimensional space, rather than on a flat surface. They published their study last year."If this conjecture fascinates people so much, it is because this kind of phenomenon shows up naturally in problems from very different fields," Wang told AFP News Agency.Wang has worked in hormonic analysis, which looks into the movement of waves.The Fields Medal is given every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40.Deng, a 37-year-old mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, was honoured for his work solving another century-old problem.In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert asked what would become known as Hilbert's Sixth Problem, how the behaviour of a whole can be calculated based on the movement of individual particles.Deng solved the problem by l...