Kakeya sets in R^3 - Prof. Hong Wang

Prof. Hong Wang
New York University (Courant institute of Mathematical Sciences) & IHES

who will deliver the Colloquium Patavinum on

Kakeya sets in R^3

A Kakeya set is a compact subset of R^n that contains a unit line segment pointing in every direction. Kakeya set conjecture asserts that every Kakeya set has Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension n. We prove this conjecture in R^3 as a consequence of a more general statement about union of tubes.

Short bio of Prof. Hong Wang:
Professor Hong Wang received her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 2011. She then obtained her diplôme d'ingénieur from École Polytechnique and a Master's degree from Paris-Sud University in 2014. In 2019, she completed her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Larry Guth. Following her PhD, Professor Wang spent two years (2019-2021) as a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 2021 to 2023, she held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, since 2023, she has been serving as an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and a permanent professor of mathematics at IHES in Paris.

Professor Wang's exceptional contributions to mathematics have been widely recognized. She was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in 2022 and the Salem Prize in 2025 "for her role in solutions to major open problems in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory." She received the 2026 Sadosky Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics. Her expertise has also earned her an invitation to speak at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians in the Analysis of PDEs section.