U of T math professor is first scholar at a Canadian university to win prestigious Fields Medal

Fields Medalist winners (L-R) Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang pose after receiving the Fields Medals during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia on July 23, 2026. Photo by ERIN BLEWETT/AFP via Getty Images

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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.

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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.

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The Fields Medal is awarded by the International Mathematical Union to scholars for both their extraordinary research and promise for future achievement.

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“It’s an incredible honour to win this award,” Tsimerman told U of T News.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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He even states AI is on the verge of outdoing mathematicians.

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“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.”

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Meanwhile, he thinks mathematicians can help our understanding of the large language models underpinning ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude and other AI systems.

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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.