NEWS Mathematics People he has been active in Math Outreach through his work Tsimerman Receives helping to train the Canadian team for the International Aisenstadt Prize Math Olympiad. He is currently the Chair of the Canadian IMO Committee.” Jacob Tsimerman of the Univer- Jacob Tsimerman was born in Kazan, Russia, on April sity of Toronto has been awarded 26, 1988. He received his PhD in 2011 from Princeton the 2017 André Aisenstadt Prize of University under Peter Sarnak, supported by an AMS the Centre de Recherches Mathé- Centennial Fellowship. He held a postdoctoral position at matiques (CRM). The prize citation Harvard University. In 2014 he was awarded a Sloan Fel- reads as follows: “Jacob Tsimerman lowship and joined the faculty at the University of Toronto. is an extraordinary mathematician He was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2015. He whose work at the interface of tran- tells the Notices: “I love watching comedy, and Improv in scendence theory, analytic number particular, and go to the UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] theory and arithmetic geometry is Theater in New York as often as I can.” Jacob Tsimerman remarkable for its creativity and The Aisenstadt Prize is awarded yearly for outstanding insight. achievement by a young Canadian mathematician no more “Jacob proved the existence of Abelian varieties defined than seven years past receipt of the PhD. over number fields that are not isogenous to the Jacobian of a curve. This had been conjectured by Katz and Oort and —From a CRM announcement follows from the André-Oort conjecture. In joint work with several collaborators, Jacob established nontrivial bounds for the 2-torsion in the class groups of number fields. For CMS Prizes Given quadratic fields, this can be done by genus theory but the general case was a complete mystery. With Bakker, Jacob The Canadian Mathematical Society has awarded several has established geometric analogues of the Frey-Mazur prizes for 2017. uniform boundedness results for elliptic curves over func- Richard Hoshino of Quest Univer- tion fields. Their approach has yielded powerful results sity has received the 2017 Adrien with methods amenable to far more general applications. Pouliot Award “for significant and sustained contributions to math- “Among Jacob’s most notable accomplishments are his ematics education in Canada.” He recent breakthroughs on the André-Oort conjecture. This founded the Nova Scotia High School conjecture about Shimura varieties, at the intersection of Math League, an outreach program diophantine geometry and the arithmetic of automorphic that reaches thousands of students forms, has been a central theme in arithmetic geometry for each year. He also served as the Direc- many years. Jacob already made important progress on it tor of the CMS National Camp for the in his thesis, but in the last few years, working together top grade 9 and 10 high school stu- with Pila, he created many of the technical tools for prov- Richard Hoshino dents in Canada from 1999 to 2004 ing the case of the Siegel modular variety. There was still and led the Dalhousie Math Circles Outreach Program from one piece that had to be completed on the size of Galois 2002 to 2004. He has contributed problems to many math- orbits. Jacob settled this final component in a brilliant ematics competitions and wrote a novel for young people short paper which showed that it follows from an average titled The Math Olympian. He has given frequent talks at form of the Colmez conjecture. The latter has been proved high schools and led professional development workshops by Andreatta, Goren, Howard and Madapusi-Perla, and for high school math teachers. He is an active member of independently by Yuan and Zhang, thus giving a complete the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group. unconditional proof of the André-Oort conjecture for this Shimura variety. “Besides being a brilliant and innovative researcher, Jacob is also an excellent expositor and teacher. Moreover, FEBRUARY 2018 NOTICES OF THE AMS 191 Mathematics People NEWS Joseph Khoury of the University of mathematics. Schoen delivered the Hopf Lectures on “How Ottawa received the 2017 Graham Curvature Shapes Space” in October 2017. The prize car- Wright Award for Distinguished Ser- ries a cash award of 30,000 Swiss francs (approximately vice. The award recognizes sustained US$30,000). and significant contributions to the The Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Canadian mathematics community, Schoen for “groundbreaking work in differential geom- particularly through involvement etry and geometric analysis, including the proof of the with CMS. Khoury’s contributions to Yamabe conjecture, the positive mass conjecture, and the the mathematical community range differentiable sphere theorem.” The citation reads in part: from committee service to writing “Schoen works in the field of geometric analysis, which Joseph Khoury books to developing “successful he and Shing-Tung Yau founded in the 1970s and 80s. It and sustained outreach activities studies geometry through nonlinear partial differential at many levels, focused on improving the general com- equations. Development in and around geometric analysis munity’s perception of mathematics and mathematics has strikingly transformed large parts of mathematics and education.” He has served on and chaired a number of CMS been a leading theme for thirty years, including in areas committees and has taken on both short-term challenges such as gauge theory in 4-dimensional topology (possible and long-term projects to benefit the society. structures in space-time), the Floer-Gromov-Witten theory Alan Beardon of the University of for pseudoholomorphic curves (closely linked to physics’ Cambridge is the recipient of the string theory), Ricci and mean curvature flow (proof of 2017 G. de B. Robinson Award of the Poincaré’s conjecture). Schoen has produced stunning the Canadian Mathematical Society results in this area from the very beginning. His work is (CMS) for his paper “Non-discrete characterised by outstanding technical skill and a clear Frieze groups” published in the Ca- vision of geometric relevance.” The Schock Prize carries nadian Mathematical Bulletin 59 a cash award of 500,000 Swedish krona (approximately (2016). The paper deals with groups US$60,000). of real isometries which map the real Schoen received his PhD in 1977 from Stanford Univer- number line to itself, with a particu- sity under Leon Simon and Shing-Tung Yau. He has held lar focus on studying the conjugacy Alan Beardon positions at the University of California Berkeley, New classes of the groups whose discrete York University, the University of California San Diego, forms correspond to the seven classic frieze groups. He is and Stanford University. His honors include a MacArthur interested in many areas of pure mathematics, and par- Fellowship (1983), the Bôcher Memorial Prize (1989), the ticularly in applying ideas that cross subject boundaries. Lobachevsky Prize (2017), and the 2017 Wolf Prize. He is a vice president of the AMS. —From a CMS announcement —Elaine Kehoe Schoen Awarded Hopf and Schock Prizes Simon Awarded Richard Schoen of the Univer- Heineman Prize sity of California Irvine has been Barry Simon of the California awarded the 2017 Heinz Hopf Prize of ETH Zurich and the 2017 Rolf Institute of Technology has been Schock Prize for his work in differen- awarded the 2018 Dannie Heineman tial geometry and geometric analy- Prize for Mathematical Physics by sis. The citation for the Hopf Prize the American Institute of Physics reads in part: “Richard M. Schoen is a (AIP) and the American Physical So- bridge-builder between physics and ciety (APS). According to the prize mathematics, and has enriched the citation, Simon was honored “for his theory of relativity with his proofs fundamental contributions to the Richard Schoen and geometric methods.” He is “a mathematical physics of quantum researcher who has introduced im- Barry Simon mechanics, quantum field theory, portant mathematical techniques and new methods in the and statistical mechanics, including field of differential geometry, which turned out to have spectral theory, phase transitions, and geometric phases, dramatic applications in the theory of general relativity, and his many books and monographs that have deeply just at the border of maths and physics.” The Hopf Prize influenced generations of researchers.” The citation reads is awarded every two years at ETH Zurich and honors in part: “The accomplishments of Barry Simon’s work form outstanding scientific achievements in the field of pure a collection of theoretical understandings ranging from an- harmonic oscillators to phase transitions, accounting for a 192 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 65, NUMBER 2 Mathematics People NEWS citation that he describes as somewhat of a ‘kitchen sink.’ • Bettye Anne Case, Florida State University His mathematical models have deep and fundamental ap- • Ruth Charney, Brandeis University plications to almost all fields of physics from condensed • Carolyn Gordon, Dartmouth College matter to atomic and molecular physics.” • MARY W. GRAY, American University Simon received his PhD in physics from Princeton • Helen G. Grundman, AMS and Bryn Mawr College University in 1970 and has been affiliated with Princeton • Ruth Haas, University of Hawaii at Manoa as well as Caltech throughout his career. He received the • Deanna Haunsperger, Carleton College Poincaré Prize of the IAMP in 2012, the Bolyai Prize of the • Rhonda J. Hughes, Bryn Mawr College Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2015, and the Leroy • Trachette Jackson, University of Michigan P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the AMS in • Naomi Jochnowitz, University of Rochester 2016. He is coauthor with Mike Reed of the four-volume • Linda Keen, City University of New York, Lehman Col- Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics. He is a fellow of lege and the Graduate Center the APS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and • Cathy Kessel, Consultant, Berkeley, California the AMS and was vice president of the AMS in 1988–1989.