IMPA celebrates ten years since Artur Avila’s Fields medal
The institute’s outstanding researcher was honored in 2014 in South Korea
12/08/2024
Ten years ago, on August 12, 2014, Brazil celebrated a historic milestone in world science: the award of the Fields Medal to Brazilian mathematician Artur Avila. The prize, known as the Nobel of Mathematics, is awarded by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) every four years to mathematicians up to 40 years old who have made extraordinary contributions to the field.
Avila is the only researcher from the Southern Hemisphere to receive the Fields Medal. The honor was one of the factors that led Brazil to occupy one of the highest rungs in mathematics, group 5, the elite, made up of the most advanced countries in the discipline.
Aged 35 at the time, Avila was already internationally renowned for his groundbreaking work on dynamical systems, an area of mathematics that studies the evolution of various phenomena over time. The researcher tackled a series of problems that had challenged the scientific community for decades.
“Artur Avila works with formidable technical power, with the ingenuity and tenacity of a master problem-solver and with an unerring nose for profound and significant issues,” the institution announced at the award ceremony, which took place in Seoul, South Korea.
Avila earned his doctorate and master’s degree from IMPA, where he began his career at the age of 17, and completed his post-doctorate in France. While there, he took up the position of research director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, a French government agency), where, alongside IMPA, he established himself as one of the brightest minds in contemporary mathematics. In 2018, he moved to the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
For Marcelo Viana, director-general of IMPA, “the Fields medal is recognition of Artur’s exceptional talent. But it wouldn’t have been possible to identify and polish this talent entirely in our country if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary progress made by Brazilian mathematics as a whole in just seven decades. So this medal is also a feat for our mathematical community and perhaps the greatest achievement of Brazilian science to date.”
The honor was the crowning achievement of years of dedication and brilliance, consolidating Brazil’s name on the world scientific stage.
“In the last decade, Brazil has established itself as one of the world’s mathematical powers, as evidenced by our ascension to the elite group of the International Mathematical Union and the numerous international prizes and distinctions awarded to Brazilian researchers,” concluded Viana.
About the Fields Medal:
The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936 by the International Mathematical Union to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40 who have made exceptional contributions to the field. The medal is considered the highest distinction in the field. The next honor will be awarded in 2026.
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