He Won Math's Highest Prize. Then Announced the End.

Exclusive first podcast with Jacob Tsimerman

Jacob Tsimerman won the Fields Medal in July. We recorded shortly after, before he starts at OpenAI.

Jacob Tsimerman is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto and one of the four winners of the 2026 Fields Medal, awarded in July at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. He is the first mathematician based at a Canadian institution to win it (even more, it’s Toronto! So that’s pretty darn cool).

He finished his undergraduate degree at Toronto at 18, took a perfect score at the 2004 International Mathematical Olympiad, and did his PhD at Princeton under Peter Sarnak. The medal recognizes his role in making o-minimality a central method in arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and his part in proving Griffiths’ conjecture and the André-Oort conjecture. He is taking leave from Toronto to join OpenAI’s AI safety team.

We cover:

• Why math is being automated faster than things that look easier

• He spent about 12 years on the André-Oort conjecture and abo…

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