Jonathan Pila

Who is Jonathan Pila?

Jonathan S. Pila is an Australian mathematician at the University of Oxford. He won the 2011 Clay Research Award for his resolution of the André–Oort conjecture in the case of products of modular curves. In June 2011, he was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society. This prize is "awarded in recognition of work in and influence on and service to mathematics; or lecturing gifts." Specifically, the citation recognized "his startling recent work on the Andre-Oort and Manin-Mumford conjectures. The approach he and his collaborators have developed, which combines analytic ideas with model theory, is entirely new and shows great promise for further applications."

Pila earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Melbourne in 1984. He then attained his doctorate from Stanford University in 1988, under supervision of Peter Sarnak. His dissertation was entitled "Frobenius Maps of Abelian Varieties and Finding Roots of Unity in Finite Fields". In 2010 he received an MA from Oxford.

In addition to the Clay and London Mathematical Society awards, he also received the Cahit Arf Lecture 2011 and the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2008-2010.