A thousand galloping horses are common, but a true patron like Bo Le is rare! This saying fits the academic community of Chinese universities today perfectly. Wang Hong has won the 2026 Fields Medal. What’s hard to believe is that back then, she couldn’t even manage to secure a place through direct graduate-school recommendation at Peking University (though she was trying to get in).

If her grades back then were ordinary and she also couldn’t get recommended, that would all be understandable. But when Wang Hong applied to study for a master’s degree in France, not a single professor in the mathematics department was willing to write a recommendation letter (for overseas study, a recommendation letter is required). In the end, it was the head teacher of her “leave-in-place” major—back at her original program—who helped write one. That really narrowed her path.
I really don’t know what mindset those Peking University professors had to do things so ruthlessly. If they’re teaching their students and they’re given an opportunity like this, they should at least help out—what loss is there in writing a recommendation letter? Or is it that Wang Hong didn’t know how to play the game, didn’t schmooze, didn’t send them gifts? So they just had to block her?!
Today Wang Hong has achieved success and acclaim, standing alongside the Nobel Prize level, becoming a top mathematician revered worldwide. She has also returned to Peking University to give a lecture. The university’s internet-famous professor, Wei Shen, even sits below listening and asking questions. I wonder what face those math department teachers had back then to say to others, “That’s my student.”
Wang Hong was admitted to Peking University as one of the top several dozen science students in her province. In her first year, she studied at the School of Earth and Space Sciences—the so-called “Earth and Space” department.
After a year, she felt she still preferred pure mathematics more. She gritted her teeth and prepared for the transfer exam, enduring an entire summer to study. In the end, she barely made it and transferred into the mathematics department.
Only after she entered the mathematics department did she truly come to understand what “masters everywhere” means. More than half of the class were contestants who entered via provincial Olympiad gold medals with recommendation. The rest were also basically from each province’s…