Servet Martínez Aguilera
A mathematical civil engineer who ended up chairing the Chilean Academy of Sciences, with the French Legion of Honour along the way and a laboratory devoted to the mathematics of the genome.
In 1969, a graduate of the Instituto Nacional (Chile's oldest state secondary school) enrolled at the Universidad de Chile to study mathematical engineering. Twenty-four years later he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas (Chile's national prize for the exact sciences); thirty-six years later he chaired the Academia Chilena de Ciencias, with the French Legion of Honour in between.
Servet Martínez's career is, to a large extent, the story of how Chile built itself a mathematics school: a modelling centre, a doctoral programme, a network with France, and a laboratory that ended up applying probability to the genome.
From the Instituto Nacional to the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie
He was born on 5 March 1952 in Santiago and did his secondary studies at the Instituto Nacional. He entered the Universidad de Chile in 1969 and qualified as a Civil Engineer in Mathematics (Ingeniero Civil Matemático) in 1975. The following year he obtained a master's in Mathematical Statistics at the Centro Interamericano de Enseñanza Estadística.
He continued in France, at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, where he earned his doctorate. He is a full professor at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Universidad de Chile and scientific director of the Centro de Modelamiento Matemático.
Born in Santiago
On 5 March. Secondary studies at the Instituto Nacional.
Enters the Universidad de Chile
Civil Engineer in Mathematics
Master's in Mathematical Statistics
Centro Interamericano de Enseñanza Estadística (CIENES).
Doctorate
Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, France.
Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas
Full member of the Academia Chilena de Ciencias
Prize of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS)
Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Genome Mathematics
Takes on its scientific direction.
President of the Academia Chilena de Ciencias
Knight of the Legion of Honour
French Republic.
Chairs the Unión Matemática de América Latina y el Caribe
Automata, dynamical systems and statistical physics
The 1993 Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas was awarded to him with particular note of his publication Automata Networks, Dynamical Systems and Statistical Physics. It is an unobvious and very fertile crossing: simple local rules — automata — that produce complex collective behaviour, studied with the tools physics uses to describe systems of many particles.
Since 2003 he has been scientific director of the Universidad de Chile's laboratory of bioinformatics and genome mathematics, where that same apparatus of probability and stochastic processes is applied to DNA sequences.
What the sources do not quite settle
He was born on 5 March 1952 in Santiago, qualified as a Civil Engineer in Mathematics in 1975 and received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas in 1993.
The Universidad de Chile's Premios Nacionales record, CONICYT's 2005 statement and the Guggenheim Foundation's record agree. He is the figure in the bank with the fewest contradictions between sources.
His doctorate from the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie dates from 1979.
The year appears on Wikipedia. The Universidad de Chile mentions two successive degrees — a «Doctor de 3er Ciclo» and later a «Doctorado de Estado en Matemáticas» — without dating either, so the exact relationship between the two is not settled.
Anecdotes, vocation or personal life.
We did not include them because we found none in any verifiable source. For Servet Martínez there are institutional records and published work, but no extensive interviews in the open. We preferred a shorter, verifiable page over padding it with second-hand material.
- Universidad de Chile. Perfil oficial de Premios Nacionales
View source → - CONICYT (2005). Nuevo presidente de la Academia Chilena de Ciencias
View source → - John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Ficha de becario Guggenheim 2008
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Servet Martínez Aguilera — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/servet-martinez
@misc{fisicaeterna_servet_martinez,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Servet Martínez Aguilera — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/servet-martinez},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}