On April 14, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the winners of the 2026 Clay Research Award on its official website, with Joshua Zahl, Chair Professor at Nankai University, among the recipients. It is the first time the award has been given to a mathematician working full time in China.

This year’s Clay Research Award recognized 10 scholars for three outstanding research achievements. Joshua Zahl and three other scholars received the award for their remarkable work on geometric problems in harmonic analysis, leading to the proof of the Furstenberg set conjecture in the plane and the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. Among them, Joshua Zahl and mathematician Wang Hong were jointly honored for their collaboration in solving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions.

In June 2025, Joshua Zahl joined the Chern Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University as a full-time professor. 

His paper with Wang Hong, “Sticky Kakeya Sets and the Sticky Kakeya Conjecture,” has been published online in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

Joshua Zahl’s research focuses primarily on classical harmonic analysis and combinatorics, including the Kakeya conjecture, the sum-product problem, and the Erdős distance set problem. His work is noted for its originality and has drawn broad attention and recognition from the international mathematical community. In particular, his major breakthrough with Wang Hong on the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions has attracted wide interest.

（Edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)