Oxford Mathematician Jonathan Pila has been awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics for his groundbreaking work on André-Oort's conjecture.
The André–Oort conjecture is a problem in Diophantine geometry, a branch of number theory. In 2011, Jonathan gave an unconditional proof of the André–Oort conjecture in the case of arbitrary products of modular curves, using the Pila-Wilkie point-counting theorem based on the theory of o-minimality. This was the first unconditional case of the conjecture beyond André's 1998 result for products of two modular curves. Over the subsequent decade, the strategy was implemented in general, in the work of many people, with a full proof of the conjecture announced in 2021 by Pila-Shankar-Tsimerman.
Jonathan Pila is Reader in Mathematical Logic and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Born in Melbourne, he received his PhD from Stanford University in 1988 under the supervision of Peter Sarnak. He held posts at Columbia University, McGill University, and the University of Bristol, as well as visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
The Rolf Schock Prizes were established and endowed by bequest of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933–1986). There are prizes in Logic and Philosophy, Mathematics, Visual Arts and Musical Arts. They are decided by the respective Swedish Academies.