CNTA 2016 (June 20-24, 2016)
14th Meeting of the Canadian Number Theory Association (CNTA XIV) - University of Calgary

Jacob Tsimerman from the University of Toronto has been selected as the recipient of the 2016 Ribenboim Prize of the Canadian Number Theory Association.
The Ribenboim Prize, named in honour of Paulo Ribenboim, is awarded for distinguished research in Number Theory by a mathematician who is Canadian or has close connections to Canadian Mathematics. Previous winners are: Andrew Granville (1999), Henri Darmon (2002), Michael Bennett (2004), Vinayak Vatsal (2006), Adrian Iovita (2008), Valentin Blomer (2010), Dragos Ghioca (2012), Florian Herzog (2014). The 2016 award will be presented at the CNTA XIV meeting, to be held from June 20 to 24, 2014 at University of Calgary.
Jacob Tsimerman is a young mathematician who just five years beyond his PhD has already made significant contributions to several long-standing problems in number theory. For example, he proved the existence of Abelian varieties defined over number fields that are not isogenous to the Jacobian of a curve. This had been conjectured by Katz and Oort and follows from the Andre-Oort conjecture. In joint work with several collaborators, non-trivial bounds were established for the 2-torsion in the class groups of number fields. For quadratic fields, this can be done by genus theory but the general case was a complete mystery. With Bakker, he has established geometric analogues of the Frey-Mazur uniform boundedness results for elliptic curves over function fields. Their approach has yielded strong results with methods amenable to far more general applications.
His most recent work on the Andre-Oort conjecture by itself might justify awarding the Ribenboim Prize. This conjecture about subvarieties of Shimura varieties has attracted a lot of attention and has been a central theme in Arithmetic Geometry for many years. Recently, he showed that for the case of principally polarized Abelian varieties, the conjecture can be proved from an average form of the Colmez conjecture. The latter has been proved by two teams of researchers, thus giving a complete unconditional proof of the Andre-Oort conjecture for this Shimura variety.
Besides being a strong and innovative researcher, Jacob is also an excellent expositor and teacher. Moreover, he has been active in Math Outreach through his work on helping to train the Canadian team for the International Math Olympiad. He is currently the Chair of the Canadian IMO Committee.