Antonio Galves passed away

The Institut Henri Poincaré is deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Antonio Galves on September 5. He was greatly appreciated by our staff and we have moving recollections of his stay with us earlier this year.

The staff, researchers and collaborators of the "Centre de Recherche, Innovation et Diffusion Scientifique en Neuromathématique (NeuroMat)" are deeply saddened to announce the death of Antonio Galves on September 5 in Campinas, Brazil.

Antonio played a central role in modern developments in probability theory and applications. He made decisive contributions to the trajectory approach to metastability, to the selection of statistical models for variable-memory Markov chains and to interacting particle systems.

He was much more than a colleague: he was a lively, charming, generous and dear friend, whose great curiosity fed and whetted his insatiable scientific appetite. Curiosity that led him to take an interest, for example, in the mathematical modeling of a linguistic subject: the rhythmic differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese, a subject on which he collaborated with his wife Charlotte Galves, Professor at the University of Campinas. This curiosity led him to devote the last ten years of his life to working tirelessly on the development of mathematical neuroscience, a new "playground" in which he played a major and extremely active role. This led him to propose, and then lead, the NeuroMat project.

Many of us had the pleasure of sharing several weeks with him this year, at the Institut Henri Poincaré, as part of the thematic programme 2023-T1B "Random processes in the brain: From experimental data to Math and back". In retrospect, these weeks seem very short: we will miss Antonio very much.