After reading many critical and complaining articles, no one talks about these details—details that allow you to view things more comprehensively. Wang Hong scored 653 out of 750 on her college entrance exam at age 16 in 2007 (when most 16-year-olds are just finishing junior high) and was admitted to Peking University. Because her score didn’t meet the cutoff for the Mathematics Department, she was reassigned to the School of Earth and Space Sciences. Even before enrollment, she planned to switch departments; during her freshman year, she took mathematics courses alongside her major and passed the rigorous department-transfer examination. But you must understand that Peking University’s Mathematics Department is filled with prodigies, and her abilities at the time were not particularly outstanding. She herself admitted, “I was constantly struggling—just surviving was already a victory,” and openly confessed she once doubted whether she was suited for mathematics. Her undergraduate grades were not top-tier, so she did not qualify for direct admission to Peking University’s graduate program. After graduating in 2011, she went to France to study abroad. During her time in France, following earlier setbacks, she took a six-month break from mathematics entirely, enrolling in architecture courses and interning at an architectural firm. Eventually, she realized architecture was constrained by practical limitations, while mathematics offered greater creative freedom—so she returned to mathematics. In 2014, she earned an engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a master’s degree from Paris-Sud University. She then went to MIT to pursue her Ph.D., under the supervision of renowned mathematician Larry Guth, specializing in harmonic analysis. In mathematics, Wang Hong was not someone who started out smoothly—perhaps because she was so young, some of her potential had yet to emerge. It was only in recent years that she published papers gradually completing a full proof, with the most critical one published in 2025 formally announcing the solution to the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture. She never had outstanding competition results and is a typical non-competition student; early on, she showed no remarkable achievements. She is a prime example of someone with talent who faced early setbacks but persisted and ultimately succeeded.