Artur Avila


Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo is a Brazilian mathematician working primarily on dynamical systems and spectral theory. He is one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, being the first Latin American to win such an award. He has been a researcher at both the IMPA and the CNRS. Since September 2018, he is a professor at the University of Zurich.

Biography

At the age of 16, Avila won a gold medal at the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad and received a scholarship for the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada to M.S. while still attending high school in Colégio de São Bento and Colégio Santo Agostinho in Rio de Janeiro. Later he enrolled in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, earning his B.S in mathematics.
At the age of 19, Avila began writing his doctoral thesis on the theory of dynamical systems. In 2001 he finished it and received his PhD from IMPA. That same year he moved abroad to France to do postdoctoral research. He works with one-dimensional dynamics and holomorphic functions. Since 2003 he has worked as a researcher for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, later becoming a research director in 2008. His post-doctoral supervisor was Jean-Christophe Yoccoz.

Mathematical work

In March of 2005, at age 26, Avila became known amongst mathematicians for proving the "conjecture of the ten martinis", a problem proposed in 1980 by the American mathematical physicist Barry Simon. Simon promised to pay ten martini doses to whoever explained his theory about the behavior of "Schrödinger operators", mathematical tools related to quantum physics. Artur solved the problem along with mathematician Svetlana Jitomirskaya and was rewarded with a few rounds of martini. Avila four months later proved the Zorich–Kontsevich conjecture that the non-trivial Lyapunov exponents of the Teichmüller flow on the moduli space of Abelian differentials on compact Riemann surfaces are all distinct together with Marcelo Viana.

Honours and recognition

Later, as a research mathematician, he received in 2006 a CNRS Bronze Medal as well as the Salem Prize, and was a Clay Research Fellow. He became the youngest professorial fellow at the CNRS in 2008. The same year, he was awarded one of the ten prestigious European Mathematical Society prizes, and in 2009 he won the Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand from the French Academy of Sciences. In 2017 he gave the Łojasiewicz Lecture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
He was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010.
In 2011, he was awarded the Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems. He received the Early Career Award from the International Association of Mathematical Physics in 2012, TWAS Prize in 2013 and the Fields Medal in 2014.
He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in April 2019.

Diplomas, titles and awards