Notre Dame mathematician's foundational work helps pave the way for a 2026 Fields Medalist
The Department of Mathematics celebrates the announcement that Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto has been awarded a 2026 Fields Medal. Awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to no more than four mathematicians under the age of 40, the Fields Medal is one of the highest honors in mathematics, and recognizes both extraordinary research accomplishments and exceptional promise for future discoveries.
Tsimerman was recognized for a series of profound advances that recast the notion of o-minimality from mathematical logic and model theory as a fundamental method in arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and for his role in the proof of many central conjectures including Griffiths' conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps, and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.
An important part of this story touches Notre Dame. The citation for Tsimerman's award notes that "the development of o-minimal theory in the holomorphic setting was initiated by Peterzil and Starchenko," referring to Sergei Starchenko, Professor of Mathematics at Notre Dame, and his longtime collaborator Ya'acov Peterzil. Their pioneering work, which Tsimerman identified as "groundbreaking", established a fundamental interface between model theory and complex algebraic geometry, providing the conceptual and technical foundations on which later breakthroughs — including Tsimerman's Fields Medal-winning work — were built.
Starchenko's research helped create an entirely new bridge between mathematical logic and arithmetic geometry. The ideas that originated in his work with Peterzil became central ingredients in the modern proofs of several long standing conjectures, illustrating how deep advances in one area of pure mathematics can reshape other, seemingly distant, fields. The recognition of Tsimerman's work illuminates the profound influence of the foundational contributions made by Starchenko and his collaborators.