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Comment by temuze | Hacker News Reader

This is Brazil's first Fields Medal - no Brazilian citizen has won a Nobel prize either. Obviously, this is a big deal for our country.

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Congratulations from Argentina! This is indeed big deal; also happy about the first Woman Field Medal.

We had was a Brazil-born British citizen who won a Nobel in medicine. He could have been a brazilian citizen, but he renounced his citizenship to avoid Brazil's mandatory military service, which to this day is still mandatory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Medawar

Thanks for the info.

About the Military service, you make it sound like it's Israel mandatory... It's more like you only have to show up there and sign a paper.

Today almost only the ones that really want get to do the military service.

But still happens, happened to me when I turned 18 in 2004. Even though I was in college and already working as an intern, I only managed to get out because I have an uncle who is a navy official.

No it's not, most of his work was developed in France because here in Brazil we don't give anything about science.

A lot of his work was developed at IMPA (Brazils Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics), which has historically been somewhat connected to french mathematics universities. But, yeah, our best minds still go abroad to become fully developed. The big problem in Brazil is that our basic education is crap. We do have good higher institutions, but a lot of the people who end up there never had a good base.

>our best minds still go abroad to become fully developed and this is what made me angry, our best researchers needs to leave the country to work because here they don't have a proper support, and when they finally succeed in something the people remember that he is brazilian like it was a determinant factor.

sorry, but IMPA indeed was a determinant factor in his prize. Much more than the french institution.

You would be right for any other world class brazilian scientist. BUt IMPA is one institution that can support a world class scientist here in Brazil.

Come on, let's not be too hard on ourselves. He went to a Brazilian federal university and then to IMPA, which is arguably a world class institution.

Sure, he probably couldn't get where he got without moving abroad, but then most of the Brazilian top football players play for foreign clubs, and yet nobody will claim that we don't encourage kids to play football. You have to take into account the sheer economic disparity between Brazil and the developed West.

It's both.

> Through the math competitions, Avila discovered IMPA, where Brazil held its Olympiad award ceremonies each year. There, he met prominent mathematicians like Carlos Gustavo Moreira and Nicolau Corção Saldanha, and while still technically in high school, he began studying graduate-level mathematics.

>In Brazil, Avila could relish mathematics without the career pressures he might have faced in the United States. “It was better for me to study at IMPA than if I were at Princeton or Harvard,” he said. “Growing up and being educated in Brazil was very positive for me."

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian-...

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