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U of T math professor is first scholar at a Canadian university to win prestigious Fields Medal
University of Toronto mathematics professor Jacob Tsimerman has won the Fields Medal, a prestigious prize often compared to the Nobel Prize that is only awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40.
He is one of four mathematicians to win this year, as well as the first academic at a Canadian university to win (the second Canadian), according to the University of Toronto News.
The Fields Medal is awarded by the International Mathematical Union to scholars for both their extraordinary research and promise for future achievement.
“It’s an incredible honour to win this award,” Tsimerman told U of T News.
Tsimerman won for his part in proving something known as the André-Oort conjecture, a problem mathematicians have mulled over for decades. It involves highly special points found inside geometric spaces, which encode arithmetic information. Mathematicians have suspected these special points appear in large numbers as part of a larger hidden geometric structure.
Tsimerman described the André-Oort conjecture as his “mathematical home,” which he found while doing his graduate work at Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2011.
He was one of three Princeton alumni to win the Fields this year. His other collaborators from the American university were Yu Deng and John Pardon. The fourth collaborator and co-winner is Hong Wang, who is a professor at New York University.
“Math is such a team sport … I’m lucky to have many of my collaborators as close friends, which helps work feel fun and playful,” he said.
According to the Princeton University News , Tsimerman has won a string of prestigious math medals and was elected a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society in 2025.
He was born in Kazan, Russia, according to the New York Times . His family emigrated to Israel in 1990, then Canada in 1996. He began his work at U of T in 2014.
While the work that won him the Fields was in number theory, he plans to shift to studying AI. He says AI has doubled his productivity, summarizing papers and sketching drafts of proofs.
He even states AI is on the verge of outdoing mathematicians.
“I think it will very shortly become more capable than mathematicians in the act of mathematics,” he told the Times. However, he worries about the dangers of AI: “I think AI is going to be a serious threat for society, for humanity.”
Meanwhile, he thinks mathematicians can help our understanding of the large language models underpinning ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude and other AI systems.
Tsimerman is a popular teacher at U of T, according to an online profile. This may stem from his childhood passion for math. By the time he was three, he was enjoying math puzzles.
He came by his passion for math honestly, influenced by family members.
“My grandfather was a physicist and my mother taught math, so I had a lot of support and resources growing up, along with plenty of puzzles to solve. And that’s what mathematics is, basically: puzzles.”
He undertook high school studies at the University of Toronto Schools, where he won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, achieving a perfect score in 2004. At just 16, he began his Bachelor of Mathematics at U of T, graduating just two years later. When he joined the faculty at U of T, he was the youngest person appointed as a full professor in the math department
Professor Mary Pugh, chair of U of T’s department of mathematics, said Tsimerman’s love of math is obvious.
“I’ve known Jacob as a student and a colleague and, obviously, he is brilliant,” she told U of T News. “His love of mathematics is absolutely infectious. He’s someone who can be routinely found in the lounge at a blackboard puzzling over something with a handful of students.”
The Fields Medal honours a Canadian, John Charles Fields , who was also a celebrated mathematician and U of T professor.
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