It is with great sadness that we inform the scientific community of the passing of a member of the MNA editorial board. Antonio Galvès passed away in his house of Campinas, Brazil, on September 5th, 2023, at the age of 76.
Antonio was one of the founding fathers of MNA. He was enthusiastic about the idea of creating a community of mathematicians working on the problems of neuroscience, finding inspiration in the deep biological and cognitive questions arising from this field, and constructing new mathematical theories to shed light on this very much unknown territory.
Antonio was a leading figure in modern probability theory.
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It is with great sadness that we inform the scientific community of the passing of a member of the MNA editorial board. Antonio Galvès passed away in his house of Campinas, Brazil, on September 5th, 2023, at the age of 76.
Antonio was one of the founding fathers of MNA. He was enthusiastic about the idea of creating a community of mathematicians working on the problems of neuroscience, finding inspiration in the deep biological and cognitive questions arising from this field, and constructing new mathematical theories to shed light on this very much unknown territory.
Antonio was a leading figure in modern probability theory. He made substantial contributions to important and difficult subjects both in probability and statistics. Among other things he paved the way to the pathwise approach to metastability, and his very innovative and influential study of statistical model selection for chains and interacting particle systems with memory and interactions of variable length.
He was also a lively, charming and dear friend to a lot of us, with a huge scientific curiosity and an immense hunger for acquiring new knowledge. His curiosity got him interested, for example, in the mathematical modelling of a linguistic problem, the rhythmic differences in European and Brazilian Portuguese, a topic on which he collaborated with his wife Charlotte. He spent the last ten years of his life working hard for the development of mathematical neuroscience, a field in which he played a major role, and was still extremely active, having several very challenging ongoing research projects that his collaborators will now have to continue without him. In particular, he founded ten years ago in Sao Paulo the NeuroMat center, meant not only to push forward the development of mathematics for neuroscience but also to promote interdisciplinary, experimental and clinical research. He was also very much committed to educating the general public on these questions, participating in the design of handout books for patients with brachial plexus lesion.
Antonio Galvès was a true giant in this field. His research has always been “ahead of the curve”. He was an influential thinker and a tireless organiser. Antonio will long be remembered for his outstanding accomplishments, his kindliness, his strength, and his commitment to interdisciplinary science.
We will miss him very much.
Authored by Olivier Faugeras, Inria, Eva Löcherbach, Paris Panthéon Sorbonne University, Patricia Reynaud-Bouret, University Côte d’Azur,
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