Jacob Tsimerman

Jacob Tsimerman is a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto specialising in number theory and related areas. He was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in the year 2015 in recognition for his work on the André–Oort conjecture and for his work in both analytic number theory and algebraic geometry.

Education

He studied at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in math. He obtained his PhD from Princeton in 2011 under the guidance of Peter Sarnak.

Jacob Tsimerman was born in Kazan, Russia, on April 26, 1988. In 1990 his family first moved to Israel and then in 1996 to Canada. In 2003 and 2004 he represented Canada in the International Mathematical Olympiad and won gold medals both years, with a perfect score in 2004.
Following his PhD, he had a post-doctoral position at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. In July 2014 he was awarded a Sloan Fellowship and he started his term as assistant professor at the University of Toronto, where he is now a full professor.
In 2018, Tsimerman was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians. In 2019, he was awarded the Coxeter–James Prize by the Canadian Mathematical Society. He is also one of winners of the 2022 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, associated with the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He was awarded for "outstanding work in analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry, including breakthroughs on the André-Oort and Griffiths conjectures". In 2023, Tsimerman received the Ostrowski Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2025.

Together with Jonathan Pila, Tsimerman demonstrated the André–Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties. Later, he completed the proof of the full André-Oort conjecture for all moduli spaces of abelian varieties by reducing the problem to the averaged Colmez conjecture which was proved by Xinyi Yuan and Shou-Wu Zhang as well as independently by Andreatta, Goren, Howard and Madapusi-Pera.