A week after accepting the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honour, on the world stage, University of Toronto Professor Jacob Tsimerman is back in his campus office.
His desk is cluttered with papers and books: “Advanced Topics in Computational Number Theory” sits across from Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Tsimerman himself is a vision of casual academia, khakis and a polo shirt, a far cry from the shiny silver-blue tuxedo he sported in Philadelphia last Thursday while accepting the gold medal for an award widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. He became the first Canadian-based researcher to be so recognized.
