Jenny Kim / Inside Higher Ed
As the men’s soccer World Cup wound down this summer, another international competition with elite players and national pride on the line was getting underway: the International Congress of Mathematicians. Like its soccer counterpart, the ICM is held every four years, and this year it was in Philadelphia. The ICM’s big prize is the Fields Medal, awarded to up to four researchers under 40. Two of this year’s recipients are Chinese nationals: Yu Deng of the University of Chicago and Hong Wang of New York University and the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies in France. One is from Canada: Soviet-born Jacob Tsimerman at the University of Toronto. One is from the United States: John Pardon at Stony Brook University.
The International Mathematical Union has bestowed 68 Fields Medals in its 90-year history. Deng and Wang bring China’s count to three. The first, Shing-Tung Yau, won in 1982. Historically, U.S. and European mathematicians have dominated the award.
I was in the room for the press conference—open to public scholars but closed to most conference-goers—when a journalist directed a question to Deng and Wang: “When are we going to see someone from China who was educated in China win the Fields Medal?”
The question was shaky on its premise. Wang earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Peking University before heading to France and then to the United States, where she earned her Ph.D. at MIT. Deng also began undergraduate studies at Peking University before leaving to earn an undergraduate degree at MIT and later a Ph.D. at Princeton. In one sense, two people educated in China had just won.
But I was also unsettled by the question’s implicit assumption that the pipeline sending the world’s best mathematicians toward U.S. universities for graduate school is a fixed feature of the global higher education landscape. It isn’t, and a room full of smart journalists didn’t seem to know this. The public needs scholars willing to say that, as the Trump administration politicizes and cuts funding in university math and science research, countries like China are accelerating investment in this domain. That undermines U.S. university life today, and it will likely weaken the U.S. economy and innovation for years to come.
Just after the press conference, I asked several mathematicians in Philadelphia for their assessment of whether the United States would continue its dominant run of Fields Medals. Shayan Oveis Gharan, a mathematician at the University of Washington who won a top math prize—the Abacus Medal—did not hesitate to respond.
“I think we’ll see more [Fields Medalists] from China, and we may not see as many from the U.S.,” Gharan told me. “Funding is an issue. All my colleagues are suffering … Visas are getting revoked … Some countries are excluded on the travel bans. I have no idea how to convince a new international student to come work with me.” China, he added, “is investing heavily, and we are cutting funding.”
I also caught up with Tsimerman, this year’s Canadian Fields Medalist, who offered a similar opinion from outside the United States: “The brain drain in math in recent years has definitely gone towards China and not the other way around,” he said. He had left Canada to pursue his Ph.D. at Princeton before returning home to teach at the University of Toronto.
He pointed to the International Congress of Basic Science, hosted at Tsinghua University in China, which draws scientists from around the world: “They’ve put a lot of money into it … They’ve been aggressively recruiting faculty.” Chinese math graduate programs, he added, are now “competitive with the best U.S. schools.” Tsinghua, he suggested, is competitive with Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.
Terence Tao, known as the “Mozart of math,” was scheduled to deliver this year’s keynote. The Australian American mathematician at UCLA won the Fields Medal in 2006. Last year, in a blog post titled, “I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding,” he wrote of policy threats.
“For over seven decades, the US has become accustomed to the status of being a superpower in … science, technology, engineering and mathematics, with many of the world’s most talented minds choosing to study, work in and, in many cases, emigrate to this country,” he wrote. The Trump administration, he continued, has since “attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem … a deliberate dismantling of the institutions, funding and freedoms that have sustained American science for generations.”
If the U.S. mathematicians sounded worried, their Chinese counterparts sounded confident. When the press conference ended, the Chinese press swarmed Deng, interviewing him in his own language. In the vicinity of this impromptu interview, I overheard some conference participants whose badges listed Chinese universities speaking in English about Shing-Tung Yau, the first Chinese-born Fields Medal recipient, who predicted (correctly) earlier this year that Wang stood a good chance of winning the Fields Medal. Citing the rapid growth of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, now in its 10th year, Yau foresees more Chinese recipients in the years ahead.
I’m all for spirited international competitions, especially the kind that involve soccer balls and chalkboards, not drones and missiles. A few weeks ago, the World Cup ended with Argentina—long a soccer power—losing the final to Spain, the aging Argentine star Lionel Messi unlikely to compete four years from now. In this year’s math tournament, you might say that China took first with two medalists, while Canada and the United States tied for second.
All this was on my mind when I headed to the packed ballroom for Terence Tao’s keynote. I left my journalist’s notebook in my bag, as his talk, “Mathematics in the Age of AI,” was on a different subject entirely. But he closed with a charge to the 1,000-odd mathematicians in the room: “Mathematicians have a responsibility to support serious science journalism and to engage in public discourse to explain and contextualize artificial intelligence–assisted methods and results.”
Tao was talking about AI. But thinking back to his blog post, he may also have been talking about moments like the one I had watched go unmet in the press conference—where journalists seemed unaware of the threat to the pipeline feeding U.S. mathematics and the broader benefits that brings to university life, the economy and innovation in this country. As the United States tightens visa policies and cuts research funding, the public needs scholars willing to explain what the country loses should it no longer remain among the dream destinations for the world’s best mathematical and scientific minds.
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