Governing Body Fellow awarded Mathematics Prize

Congratulations to Wolfson Governing Body Fellow Jonathan Pila who has been awarded the 2022 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics, for his ground-breaking work on André-Oort's conjecture.

Jonathan is an Australian mathematician now working in the University of Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. He completed his Bachelor's degree in Melbourne and then his PhD at Stanford in 1988. He then held positions at Columbia, McGill, Bristol and (as a visiting scholar) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before taking an extended break from the world of mathematics to work in his family's business.

He is mainly active in Diophantine geometry, which is a branch of number theory that studies Diophantine equations using algebraic geometry. Pila has decisively enriched this field by introducing methods based on model theory in mathematical logic. Using these methods, together with Zannier, he provided a completely new proof of the Manin-Mumford conjecture. He has subsequently, partly in collaboration with Tsimerman, made important contributions to the even more demanding André-Oort conjecture.

Click here to read more about the Rolf Schock Prizes.