The International Congress of Mathematicians 2026 opened in Philadelphia, with the four recipients of this year's Fields Medal announced—Deng Yu, John Paden, Jacob Zimmermann, and Wang Hong. Among them, Deng Yu and Wang Hong became the first Chinese nationals to receive the Fields Medal since its establishment, while the newly crowned recipient Zimmermann announced at a press conference after the event that he would shift his research focus to AI safety and join OpenAI soon.

Core conjectures are solved, mathematical talent is highly praised by OpenAI

Zimmermann's key achievement leading to this award was redefining the theory of o-minimality as a fundamental research tool in arithmetic geometry and complex algebraic geometry, and successfully proving several core academic conjectures, including the algebraicity conjecture of Griffiths' period image and the André-Oort conjecture related to Siegel modular varieties, making a significant contribution to number theory development. Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and Babak, former Vice President of Microsoft AI and current OpenAI researcher, both confirmed and expressed their welcome. Mark Chen praised Zimmermann for his top-tier mathematical talent, and also admired his rigorous and cautious attitude towards AI safety issues, as well as his profound and insightful thinking.

*MO two-time gold medalist, studied under the renowned number theorist Sarnak

Zimmermann is a Canadian mathematician specializing in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and transcendental number theory, born in 1988. As a teenager, he represented Canada in the 2003 and 2004 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), winning two gold medals and achieving a perfect score in 2004. He studied at the University of Toronto, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 2011, and studied under the renowned number theorist Peter Sarnak. After that, he did postdoctoral research at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has been teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto since 2014. A scholar who has just reached the peak of the mathematical world choosing to cross over into AI safety is itself a strong signal—that in the context of rapidly advancing AI capabilities, the appeal of AI safety governance is beginning to rival pure academic research for top talents.