Artur Avila, Fields Medal 2014

Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo (born 29 June 1979) 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 (working a half-year in each one). 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 (IMPA) 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 (UFRJ), 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 (CNRS) 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.

Awards

• Fields Medal (2014)
• TWAS Prize (2013)
• Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems (2011)
• EMS Prize (2008)
• Salem Prize (2006)
• Gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad (1995)