The 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians opened on the morning of July 23 in Philadelphia. The four recipients of the Fields Medal for this year were announced: Deng Yu, John Paden, Jacob Tsimerman, and Wang Hong. Among them, Deng Yu and Wang Hong became the first Chinese nationals to win the Fields Medal since its establishment, making history. Shortly after the announcement of the highest honor in mathematics, one of the newly awarded recipients revealed his next step in life: focusing on AI safety, and soon joined OpenAI.

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This is Jacob Tsimerman. His core achievement that led him to win the Fields Medal was redefining the theory of o-minimality as a fundamental research tool in arithmetic geometry and complex algebraic geometry, and successfully proving several central conjectures in the academic community, including the algebraicity conjecture of Griffiths' period image and the André-Oort conjecture related to Siegel modular varieties, making significant contributions to number theory. After the press conference, he announced his intention to shift his research focus to AI safety and soon joined OpenAI. Upon the news, Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and Sebastien Bubeck, former Deputy President of Microsoft AI and current researcher at OpenAI, both confirmed and expressed their welcome. Mark Chen praised Tsimerman for his top-level mathematical talent, and also admired his rigorous and careful attitude and profound and unique thinking towards AI safety issues.