Born in 1984, Alessio Figalli received his master's degree in mathematics from the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa in 2006. One year later he earned his doctorate – Optimal transportation and action-minimizing measures – at the École normale supérieure de Lyon under the supervision of Luigi Ambrosio and Cédric Villani. He was appointed Chargé de recherche at the CNRS in 2007 and he went to the École polytechnique as Professeur Hadamard in 2008. In 2009 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin as Associate Professor. Then he became Full Professor in 2011, and R. L. Moore Chair holder in 2013. Since 2016, he is a chaired professor at ETH Zürich.
Figalli has worked in the theory of optimal transport, with particular emphasis on the regularity theory of optimal transport maps and its connections to Monge–Ampère equations. More recently, in collaboration with Alice Guionnet, he introduced and developed new transportation techniques in the topic of random matrices to prove universality results in several-matrix models.
Amongst his several recognitions, Figalli has won the 2017 edition of the Feltrinelli Prize for mathematics and the 2015 edition of the Stampacchia Medal, he has been appointed Nachdiplom Lecturer in 2014 at ETH Zürich, he has been awarded an EMS Prize in 2012 and the Peccot-Vimont Prize 2011 of the Collège de France… and now he won the Fields Medal at the age of 34.
The Fields Medal is widely regarded as the highest honor a mathematician can receive, and has been described by many as the mathematician's Nobel Prize It is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years.
Alessio Figalli thus enters the history of mathematics on this August 1st, 2018 on the occasion of the International congress of cathematicians which is taking place this year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 1 to 9 August.