Yu Deng

Sep 30, 2026

Yu Deng

by

Steven Strogatz

Li Rui—Xinhua/Getty Images

Big things are made from hordes of little things. This duality between the individual and the group runs through some of today’s greatest scientific mysteries. How does consciousness emerge from billions of neurons? An immune response from swarms of cells?

There are very few places where science can rigorously bridge the gulf between the micro and the macro. Mathematician Yu Deng has found remarkable new ways to do it. He and his collaborators have shown how the smooth flow of air and other gases emerges from enormous numbers of tiny, billiard-ball-like particles ricocheting according to Newton’s laws. Deng’s secret weapon is combinatorics: finding hidden patterns in the explosion of possible interactions.

For breakthroughs like these, Deng, 37, won one of this year’s Fields Medals. His ideas may someday help us span the micro-macro gulf in other complex systems.

Strogatz is a mathematics professor at Cornell University and a co-author of the forthcoming Big Math

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