Medal Anomalies

For the past few days, news that Hong Wang and Yu Deng have received the 2026 Fields Medals has been everywhere. This is, of course, something worth celebrating. Through long and arduous work, two Chinese mathematicians have reached the heights of the mathematical world. No amount of congratulations would be excessive.

And yet the spectacle surrounding these two medals has left me increasingly uneasy.

Wang and Deng both entered Peking University in 2007, and now they have received Fields Medals in the same year. The coincidence is genuinely rare. It was therefore quickly attributed to the success of Peking University’s education, and the two medals were in turn treated as proof of progress in Chinese education. It was as though, overnight, every educational problem we had repeatedly discussed had been answered: if a system can produce two Fields Medalists, then perhaps there is nothing wrong with it at all. Perhaps it is already excellent enough.

Reports began removing inconvenient remarks. Schools and institutions began searching for old stories that connected them to the laureates. Even distant family ties were brought forward as a claim on the honor. The medals became magnets, pulling in every person and institution eager to catch some reflected glory.

I call this behavior the “medal anomaly.”

Has Our Education Improved?

The educational histories of Wang and Deng can hardly support such a perfectly rounded conclusion.

Wang did not initially enter Peking University as a mathematics major. She later transferred into mathematics through her own interest and effort. After leaving Peking University, she studied and conducted research in France and the United States, moving for years among different academic environments. Deng transferred to MIT after two years at Peking University, completed his doctoral training at Princeton, and has since spent his career at American universities.

They certainly received an education at Peking University and may well have benefited from its courses, teachers, and fellow students. But their eventual achievements plainly came from more than those few years. They also came from long periods of study abroad, academic mobility, collaboration with peers, and personal choice.

These experiences are not fine print beside the medals. They are essential to understanding how these mathematicians grew.

Yet in many celebratory narratives, people want only to see that they are “Peking University alumni.” They are less willing to look seriously at why the two later left, where they went, and in what environments they completed their research. As long as the starting point was domestic, every road thereafter can apparently be folded away, and the final honor can flow backward through the résumé until it lands in the account book of the alma mater, or even of the entire educational system.

That makes no sense.

More importantly, even if their success was genuinely connected to domestic education, it still cannot answer the questions that have long confronted that education.

Are students still reduced to scores and rankings too early? Is curiosity still worn down by repetitive training? Is changing one’s major sufficiently free? Do young researchers have a stable and tolerant environment in which to work? Can a school accept that someone may spend years publishing no papers and winning no prizes, quietly studying a problem that remains unsolved? And do ordinary students—those who show no talent for competitions, enter no famous university, and ultimately win no international prize—receive the respect they deserve?

Two Fields Medals do not make these questions disappear.

The fact that a few extraordinary people can pass through a system does not mean the system is equally kind to most people. At times, it may show only that they were intelligent, determined, and fortunate enough to overcome its limits and find paths better suited to them.

A medal can establish the excellence of its recipient. It cannot automatically establish the superiority of a system.

If we rush to use two people’s success to cover the difficulties that remain in education, then the medals cease to be honors alone. They become a sleight of hand. They allow us to forget, briefly, everyone who never reached the podium, while the questions that truly demand answers are once again postponed amid the celebrations.

Two medals cannot change the problems already present in education, much less serve as a cloth with which to hide them.

The More You Hide, the More You Reveal

More disturbing than excessive credit-taking is the selective presentation of what the laureates have said.

In one interview, Deng discussed the attitude young people should take toward studying and conducting research abroad. His answer was neither extreme nor dismissive of academic development at home. Drawing on his own experience, he simply acknowledged that different academic environments have different strengths. Young researchers who have the opportunity, he suggested, should see the wider academic world for themselves, experience different research environments, and then decide which place suits them best.

It was an ordinary and honest answer.

Yet this portion quietly disappeared from the university-level Peking University account’s repost. What remained were courage, passion, perseverance, the cultivation of the alma mater, and the progress of Chinese mathematics. What vanished was his genuine judgment about the value of overseas study.

This was not an ordinary editorial choice.

When a report preserves everything suited to celebration but removes precisely the answer most likely to prompt discussion, it is difficult to believe that length alone was the reason. It looks more like a filter applied in advance: some words may be seen; others may damage a story that has been made too complete, and are therefore better left out.

Such selective reporting is, in my view, shameful.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are omitted from a report. Both Wang and Deng have spent many years studying and conducting research abroad. They encountered different universities and academic traditions, and they built their research trajectories through movement across borders. Acknowledging the value of those experiences does not diminish the dignity of domestic universities.

A truly confident educational environment should permit people to discuss differences openly. It should also allow young people to choose whether to stay or leave according to their own needs.

The less able it is to tolerate such an ordinary judgment, the less confident it appears.

More troubling still, such deletion is not confined to a single report. Over time, people learn what can be said and what is better left unsaid. Editors learn what to remove. Interviewers learn what not to ask. Interviewees begin trimming their own expression in advance.

No one needs to issue a public order, yet everyone understands how to make a sentence disappear.

Control of public discussion does not always arrive as a severe prohibition. More often, it takes the form of a pervasive caution: everyone fears that one extra sentence may invite trouble, so complex facts are voluntarily arranged into a safe shape. The resulting reports contain nothing but correct sentences, yet those sentences cannot be assembled into a complete reality.

The self-censorship born of universal insecurity is often more durable than any explicit command.

This selective truth is more unsettling than a naked lie. The effort to conceal only reveals more. The more we try to prove that our environment is superior, the less willing we are to let laureates speak frankly about their overseas experience. The more we try to appear composed and confident, the more we delete personal judgments that are not radical at all, but remarkably mild.

If a system cannot accommodate even the real experiences of its successful people, why should anyone believe that it truly respects knowledge and research?

The People Who Once Knew Them

After the prizes were announced, another familiar spectacle quickly appeared.

People who had once worked with Wang or Deng were sought out for interviews. Former teachers began remembering them; old classmates retold stories. Details buried for years were unearthed one by one: how they solved problems as children, what habits they had, what they once said in a particular class, what signs of talent they displayed when young.

People seemed desperate to reconstruct their pasts, as though enough details might reveal a secret formula for reaching the Fields Medal.

Not all of this is bad. Teachers may naturally feel proud of their students, and old friends may understandably recall the past. But when every recollection arrives at once, and is packaged as a legend whose ending had always been inevitable, the exercise becomes suspect.

Before someone becomes famous, their silence, hesitation, and ordinariness attract little attention. Once a medal hangs from their neck, every minor encounter from years ago suddenly acquires value.

The poor may live unnoticed in a crowded city; the rich will find distant kin even deep in the mountains.

More absurdly, schools and institutions with extremely remote connections joined the celebration. Sun Yat-sen University published a congratulatory article because, once the chain was traced, Deng’s parents had been alumni. Guilin High School held an event to revisit the life of its alumnus Hong Wang and study her supposed “mathematician spirit.”

An academic honor belonging to mathematicians thus spread outward along family ties, alma maters, and old relationships, until it became a ceremony of layered claims and shared glory.

Apparently, if one can find a thread thin enough somewhere in a résumé, one earns the right to stand beside the medal for a photograph.

I do not know why we do this. Is there no shame in it?

What is truly worth doing for a school, if not examining how it treats students today? Does it allow a student to change direction? Does it protect different interests? Can it provide freedom for genuine research? If none of these questions is discussed, while the school busies itself with a meeting on the “spirit” of one successful alumnus, then the supposed act of learning is often nothing more than decorating itself with someone else’s honor.

“Spirit” is the easiest thing to claim. It requires no improvement to a curriculum, no institutional change, and no new resources. Hold a meeting, write an article, hang a few slogans, and an institution can pretend that it has established a connection with greatness.

The most ridiculous feature of the medal anomaly is that honor can attach itself outward without limit, while responsibility never spreads in the same way.

When an alumnus wins a major prize, the alma mater can trace relationships back decades and speak at length about cultivation and tradition. But when someone once listed as a distinguished alumnus later falls through illegal or corrupt conduct, schools often remove the name and photograph overnight, as though leaving them up for one more second would damage the institution’s reputation.

In success, the alumnus and school are said to be inseparable. After scandal, personal behavior is suddenly declared unrelated to the institution. When honor is needed, the connection can be traced through parents, hometown, and childhood. When embarrassment must be borne, the connection disappears cleanly in a single night.

The whole thing is profoundly absurd.

Such an alumni narrative does not respect people. It calculates their usefulness.

If a person succeeds, display them as proof that the school succeeded. If a person fails, remove them quickly as proof that the school is innocent. What the person actually did, what they experienced, and what relationship they truly had with the institution matter far less.

What matters is only whether their name can presently add glory to the collective.

Return the Medals to the Medalists

We can certainly be happy for Wang and Deng, and we can seriously learn about their work and their growth. Genuine congratulations need not be stingy. Nor must criticism of these spectacles diminish what the two mathematicians achieved.

But the medals belong first to the laureates, and to the collaborators with whom they completed their research.

They do not belong to an educational system eager to prove its own superiority. They do not belong to a perfect report reconstructed after key remarks have been removed. And they do not belong to schools and institutions that suddenly recover old connections in order to share the honor.

Above all, we should not use two medals to hide the educational problems that remain. The appearance today of two outstanding mathematicians is cause for joy. The fact that countless students still lose their interests inside rigid systems of evaluation is equally real. The former cannot cancel the latter, much less be used to stop people from continuing to ask questions.

A society that truly respects knowledge should have the courage to see a complete life: to see how these mathematicians benefited from domestic education and how they actively sought environments abroad; to see the help their alma mater provided and the importance of personal choice, international mobility, and collaboration; to see the glory of success while refusing to turn successful people into material for collective propaganda.

Hong Wang and Yu Deng have already answered the mathematical questions that belonged to them.

Whether our education has truly improved, whether our reporting can contain reality, and whether our schools understand respect rather than appropriation—these are questions their medals cannot answer on our behalf.

The medal anomaly is absurd precisely because everyone is rushing to share in the answer, while few are willing to face the real questions.