Rate My Professor Federico Ardila

Federico Ardila is a professor of mathematics at San Francisco State University, specializing in algebraic, geometric, and topological combinatorics. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 2003, with Richard P. Stanley as his advisor. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and as a Microsoft Research Theory Group Postdoc Fellow from 2004 to 2006, Ardila joined San Francisco State University as an assistant professor in 2005, advancing to full professor in 2016. He concurrently serves as an adjunct professor at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, since 2006. As of 2026, Ardila is on leave from San Francisco State University while holding the positions of Chair in Combinatorics and Royal Society Wolfson Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

Ardila's research centers on combinatorics and its connections to geometry, algebra, topology, and applications, with significant contributions to matroid theory, polytopes, and CAT(0) cube complexes. His key publications include "Lagrangian geometry of matroids" with Graham Denham and June Huh (Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 2023), "Hopf monoids and generalized permutohedra" with Marcelo Aguiar (Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 2023), "The Bergman complex of a matroid and phylogenetic trees" (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 2006), "The bipermutahedron" (Combinatorial Theory, 2022), and "The geometry of matroids" (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 2018). Ardila has received numerous accolades, including Fellowship of the American Mathematical Society (2018), Simons Fellowship in Mathematics (2019-2020), NSF CAREER Award (2010-2016), Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2022), Clay Lecturer (2024), and the Mathematical Association of America National Haimo Award for Teaching (2020). He advocates for diversity in mathematics through initiatives like the MSRI-UP program, which earned the AMS Mathematics Programs that Make a Difference Award (2021), and his article "Todos Cuentan: Cultivating Diversity in Combinatorics" (Notices of the AMS, 2016).