Santiago Arango-Piñeors is a Colombian Ph.D. candidate in Arithmetic Geometry at Emory University, where he is advised by David Zureick-Brown. Raised in Bogotá, Colombia, he fulfilled the compulsory military service before receiving his BS in Mathematics and a second BS in Environmental Engineering from Los Andes University in 2016. After becoming obsessed with moduli spaces of elliptic curves, the topic of his undergraduate dissertation, Santiago decided to abandon engineering to continue his education in Mathematics. Before the start of his PhD program, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he obtained an MSC in Mathematics at Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA).

Santiago’s research interests revolve around Arithmetic Statistics. In particular, he often thinks about abelian varieties over finite fields, modular curves, and heights on stacks. Santiago is currently working towards completing his dissertation and hopes to continue working in academia after graduation. His research area is called arithmetic geometry, and it lies at the intersection of algebraic geometry and number theory. In this mathematical universe, arithmetic objects, such as prime numbers, are understood as geometric objects, and this geometric intuition is leveraged to provide insight when considering arithmetic questions. More specifically, Santiago's research lies within the subfield of arithmetic statistics, which focuses on the statistical quantification of arithmetic objects.

Santiago is also passionate about teaching, and credits his previous mentors (Xavier Caicedo, Guillermo Mantilla-Soler, Carolina Araujo, Eduardo Esteves, and David Zureick-Brown) for inspiring him to become a teacher and researcher.

Santiago enjoys mentoring younger students at Emory: "Being part of a small department makes it really important to rely on other students when we are stuck. Now that I am reaching the final years of my program, I am happy to explain to anyone who asks about all the mistakes that I've made in the past."

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Santiago Arango

“Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to reflect on my culture, history, and identity and to recognize the contributions of Latino mathematicians to the field; especially those in my community whose contributions often go unnoticed. It is also a time to inspire and empower the next generation of Latino mathematicians, and to promote greater diversity and inclusion in the mathematical community. During this month, I dream that in the near future I might be able to help Colombian students with fewer educational opportunities than the ones I’ve had to have access to top-tier graduate education in number theory.”

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