The school announced Thursday <\/a>that Jacob Tsimerman won the prestigious Fields Medal for his work in proving the Andr\u00e9-Oort conjecture. They described the mathematical conundrum as a complex theory that concerns the appearance of highly special points inside geometric spaces that encode rich arithmetic information. <\/p>\nTsimerman, who earned his bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics at U of T in just two years after starting his studies at 16 years old, is the first scholar at a Canadian institution to win the award and only the second Canadian ever to get the honour.<\/p>\n
\u201cMath is such a team sport that it becomes impossible to disentangle who contributed what on projects. I\u2019m lucky to have many of my collaborators as close friends, which helps work feel fun and playful,\u201d Tsimerman said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The math prodigy says he\u2019s been toiling with puzzles ever since he was three years old, and was surrounded by brains in his early years through his physicist grandfather and math teacher mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a lot of support and resources growing up, along with plenty of puzzles to solve. And that\u2019s what mathematics is, basically: puzzles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Thursday\u2019s honour, Tsimerman\u2019s previous accomplishments include two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and a perfect score in the competition in 2004.<\/p>\n
He earned his PhD from Princeton in 2011 and before he joined U of T\u2014where he became the youngest person ever get full professor status in the department of mathematics\u2014he was a junior fellow in Harvard University\u2019s Society of Fellows.<\/p>\n
The Fields is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40.<\/p>\n
The award is named after John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who also studied and taught at U of T.<\/p>\n
Tsimerman is expected to speak to reporters later this afternoon following an awards ceremony in Toronto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A University of Toronto professor has been awarded what\u2019s been described as the \u201cNobel Prize\u201d of mathematics for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[712,43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-821307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-apple-news","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}