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. 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.

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 Zaniier. 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.

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.

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

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. 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."

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. and the Karp Prize 2013. Pila was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.