Ten years since the Fields Medal: Artur Avila gives a talk at IMPA Tech

16/08/2024

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, IMPA Tech will host IMPA’s extraordinary researcher, Artur Avila – the only Latin American to be awarded the prize, known as the Nobel of mathematics – next Monday (19) at 2pm. The event will take place in the auditorium of the institute’s undergraduate course, located in Port Maravalley, and marks the start of the 2nd term of the Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics of Technology and Innovation.

Known for his remarkable contributions to the theory of dynamical systems, an area of mathematics that studies the evolution of various phenomena over time, Avila will share his experiences from the time he arrived at IMPA at the age of 17, through his contributions to the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, a French government agency) and later to the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

“By bringing Artur to open the school term, we want to provide IMPA Tech students with an extraordinary opportunity to expand and deepen their vision of mathematics,” said IMPA’s director general, Marcelo Viana.

The Fields Medal is awarded by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) every four years to mathematicians up to the age of 40 who have made outstanding contributions to the field.

The honor presented to the IMPA researcher on August 12, 2014, 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 recognized for his innovative work. The researcher was awarded the prize after tackling 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 deep and meaningful questions,” said the IMU on the occasion of the award ceremony in Seoul, South Korea.

IMPA Tech will train professionals of the future

Free and innovative, IMPA Tech was born at a crucial moment in the digital transformation with the mission of training highly qualified young people for the technology job market.

The degree in Mathematics for Technology and Innovation is four years long and after a basic cycle, students will be able to choose between emphases: Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science and Physics. The selection process for 2024 was also innovative in that 80% of places were allocated to students with the best performances in five knowledge olympiads (OBMEP, OBM, OBQ, OBI and OBF). IMPA Tech wants to attract talent from all over the country to Rio de Janeiro.

Read more: Marcelo Viana debates innovation and technology at Rio Innovation Week
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