Mathematician who solved the 100-year-old Kakeya conjecture is moving to China. Here's why

American mathematician Joshua Zahl, who recently solved a 100-year-old math problem, has packed his bags and is set to leave Canada’s University of British Columbia (UBC). His breakthrough in the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture attracted attention worldwide, and universities across the world started vying to get him on board. A Chinese university has won the race as Zahl is taking up a full-time position at Nankai University’s Chern Institute of Mathematics (CIM). He will be a chair professor at the university, according to the Chinese educational institution’s website.

The note on the website further states that Zahl met Chen Yulu, president of Nankai University. There, he praised CIM’s intense academic atmosphere and excellent research team, and called it an ideal research platform, according to the website article. He is the third internationally renowned mathematician to be offered a full-time position at the university in recent months, according to SCMP. The CIM is named after its founder, renowned Chinese mathematician SS Chern, who established the institute in 1985.

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Zahl worked with Wang Hong from New York University to solve the math problem, posting the solution in a 127-page preprint paper on the open-access repository arXiv in February. Mathematicians across the world have been working on the Kakeya problem. Zahl's doctoral mentor, UCLA mathematician Terence Tao, is one of them and immediately hailed Zahl's achievement. He confirmed in his blog the next day that Zahl and Wang had made "some spectacular progress in geometric measure theory" and had resolved “the three-dimensional case of the infamous Kakeya set conjecture”.

“It’s like perfecting a perpetual-motion machine. It’s magical; they are getting more out of the output than they put in. Their approach proves the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture,” Tao wrote. Notably, Tao published his ideas on the conjecture in 2014 on his blog, and this acted as a foundation for Zahl and Wang’s work.

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Zahl's work on the Kakeya conjecture

Zahl and Wang's collaboration spans years and they decided to work on the Kakeya conjecture. The solution provided by them runs multiple pages. They have proved the Kakeya conjecture in three articles they call a trilogy, where the solution gradually unravels. The first paper, titled “Sticky Kakeya Sets and the Sticky Kakeya Conjecture”, was published in 2022. Zahl and Wang proved the absence of sticky counterexamples to the Kakeya conjecture, strongly supporting its validity.

The second article was published online in 2024 and then in the April 29 print edition of the top mathematics journal Inventiones Mathematicae this year. Both Zahl and Wang are up for the Fields Medal in 2026, also known as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. It is given every four years to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40. Zahl would also give a 45-minute presentation here at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia.