Fields Medal: Artur Avila surprised, happy and above all … relieved! – Le Figaro

INTERVIEW – With his leading man physique and his fascination with the beauty of dynamic systems, the young French-Brazilian mathematician * received the Fields Medal, “the equivalent Nobel ‘of mathematics

LE FIGARO -. What was your reaction when you learned that you had won

Artur AVILA – Surprised, happy, and above all … relieved! They cited my name since 2010 and it’s not healthy to work with this pressure. I thought it would be more for 2018, but I am glad I did not wait four more years!

As is tradition, you have heard it a few months ago but need not covering the story. This is not too hard to keep such a secret?

It is not difficult … as long as you do not ask you! To all those who questioned me I had to find an answer that was not really a lie, but not the truth either … I wanted to surprise my friends, but alas, the news leaked a few hours before the official announcement .

What do you do Staffing € 10,000 associated with the coin

I’ve almost spent everything, including .. . myself to buy costumes for Congress

What is the medal changes in your career?

This brings me especially obligations in terms of communication. This is an opportunity to get people interested in the science, particularly in Brazil. It should tell young people that we can do math very interesting career.

Can you summarize your work

I work dynamical systems: I study what will happen in the next moment. In the long run, the laws that govern the probability that a system evolves towards a particular behavior do not work and the predictions become very difficult.

You say you are not really interested in their applications practices …

I have a lot of gratitude to the people who work on the practical applications of mathematics, and for the advancement of the discipline. But personally I prefer the pure mathematics. I love the beauty of math …

You enjoy working at the beach, By displaying a natural leading man … You do not fit quite the image, often austere, that one is a mathematician.

I’m only 35 so I’m still a young mine … As for my physical, it comes from the ICM 2010 . I had to make a presentation and I was so stressed that I started to do gymnastics intensively to sleep again

* Artur Avila is CNRS research director at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu, Paris Rive Gauche (CNRS / Université Paris Diderot / UPMC), and also worked at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).