Jonathan Pila

Jonathan Solomon Pila (born 1962)[1] FRS[3] is an Australian mathematician at the University of Oxford.

Jonathan Pila
Jonathan Pila in 2015, portrait from the Royal Society
Born
Jonathan Solomon Pila

(1962-07-28) July 28, 1962[1]
Melbourne, Australia
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford
ThesisFrobenius maps of Abelian varieties and finding roots of unity in finite fields (1988)
Doctoral advisorPeter Sarnak[2]
Websitewww.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/jonathan.pila

Education

Pila earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Melbourne in 1984. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford University in 1988, for research supervised by Peter Sarnak.[2] 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.[4]

Career and research

Pila's research interests lie in number theory and model theory. A focus has been applying the theory of o-minimality to Diophantine problems. This work began with an early paper with Enrico Bombieri, and developed through collaborations with Alex Wilkie and Umberto Zannier. The techniques obtained have led to advances in Diophantine problems, including Pila's unconditional proof of the André–Oort conjecture for powers of the modular curve.[3] Work by Pila and Jacob Tsimerman, demonstrated the André–Oort conjecture in the case of the Siegel modular variety.[5]

Pila has held posts at Columbia University, McGill University, the University of Bristol and (as a visiting member) the Institute for Advanced Study. Pila also took a substantial break from professional mathematics to work in his family's manufacturing business.[3]

Pila has been the Editor of Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, and of Algebra and Number Theory.[4]

Awards and honours

Pila was awarded the Clay Research Award in 2011 for his resolution of the André–Oort conjecture in the case of products of modular curves.[4][6] In June 2011, he was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society.[7] This prize is "awarded in recognition of work in and influence on and service to mathematics; or lecturing gifts."[7] 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."[7]

In addition to the Clay and London Mathematical Society awards, he has also received the Cahit Arf Lecture 2011,the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2008-2010.[4] and the Karp Prize 2013.[8] Pila was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.[3]

References
  1. "PILA, Dr Jonathan Solomon". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  2. Jonathan Pila at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. "Professor Jonathan Pila FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  4. "Jonathan Pila". University of Oxford, Mathematical Institute. Retrieved 27 November 2011.
  5. "February 2018". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 65 (2): 191. 2018. ISSN 1088-9477.
  6. "Jonathan Pila receives a 2011 Clay Research Award". Archived from the original on 30 May 2011. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  7. "London Mathematical Society Prizes 2011" (PDF) (Press release). London Mathematical Society. Retrieved 27 November 2011.
  8. "Prizes and Awards". Association of Symbolic Logic. Archived from the original on 28 August 2015. Retrieved 27 August 2015.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.