Artur Avila

Prof. Dr. Artur Avila, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1979, started his PhD at the age of 19 at the institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA). After graduating in 2001, he went to Paris for a two-year post-doctoral degree, after which he became a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France’s largest state-run science organization. In 2008, he was promoted to Director of Research at CNRS – the youngest ever.

He has won many highly prestigious awards, such as the Salem Prize in 2006 and the Prize of the European Mathematical Society in 2008. In 2014, at the age of 35, he was the first Latin American to receive the Fields Medal, often described as the mathematician’s Nobel Prize, “for his profound contributions to dynamical systems theory, which have changed the face of the field”, according to the International Mathematical Union.