Fields Medal 2026: ICM Awards, IMO Records, and AI Breakthroughs in One Week

A lot has happened in the mathematical world over the past two weeks. Here is a quick rundown of everything that went on — and there was quite a bit.

Fields Medal 2026 and the ICM: A Once-in-Four-Years Event

• The International Congress of Mathematicians took place — held only once every four years
• The Fields Medal was awarded — presented exclusively at this congress
• The congress’s other prizes were also handed out — important, if less well-known than the Fields: the Abacus Medal, the Chern Medal, the Gauss Prize, and the Leelavati Prize

IMO 2026: AI Achieves a Perfect Score for the First Time

The International Mathematical Olympiad for school students also took place — and it came with yet another AI record. For the first time in history, an AI solved all 6 problems in full, scoring 42 out of 42 points.

AI Topples Two Major Conjectures Linked to Fields Medal Research

It wasn’t just the Olympiad where AI made headlines. Two significant mathematical results were reached with the help of artificial intelligence:

• Jacobi’s conjecture was disproved — 140 years of searching ended with a short post on what used to be Twitter
• The cycle double cover conjecture from graph theory was also solved by AI — though without quite the same media frenzy as the Jacobi result

In short, a lot happened. Write in if I missed anything — this week we’ll go through everything in more detail.

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