Bart Michels

Bart Michels is a Belgian mathematician and software engineer. He represented Belgium at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2013. He earned a PhD in Mathematics at Universite Sorbonne Paris Nord (defended July 2022, advisor Farrell Brumley), after an MS at Sorbonne Universite and a BS at Universiteit Gent, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn (2022-2023). He has since worked in industry: Senior Quantitative Analyst at the Belgian bank Belfius (Aug 2023-May 2024, per his LinkedIn profile), then Machine Learning Engineer and later Senior Software Engineer at AKUR8, a company providing actuarial AI software for insurance pricing. He also co-founded Flordi Coworking & Meeting Rooms and has been a Math Olympiad trainer for the Vlaamse Wiskunde Olympiade. All employment details below are drawn from his LinkedIn profile as indexed; independent primary-source corroboration of the roles was not found.

Notes7

• Quant employment verification: UNRESOLVED. The only employment evidence found is the LinkedIn profile indexed for Bart Michels (linkedin.com/in/bart-michels), which lists 'Senior Quantitative Analyst' at Belfius (a Belgian bank/insurer) from August 2023 to May 2024, described as 'Portfolio risk modeling'. That is an index-only, self-reported claim with no independent primary-source confirmation; the caller's supplied lead of the same role matched it but carried no identity_match_evidence. Employer classification: Belfius is a Belgian retail bank and insurer, so a quantitative-analyst role there would be a bank quant-finance role, not a trading/market-making/hedge-fund firm; AKUR8, the current employer, is an actuarial-insurance software company, not a quant trading firm; no trading, market-making, hedge-fund, energy or crypto trading employment surfaced in searches. Identity itself is supported: the LinkedIn profile's mathematics background (BS Ghent, MS Sorbonne, PhD Sorbonne Paris Nord, IMO trainer) converges with the Belgian IMO 2013 mathematician record. Because the quant role rests solely on the index and no primary source was found, the claim is retained with explicit uncertainty rather than confirmed.May 2024
• Senior Quantitative Analyst at Belfius (Aug 2023-May 2024) and earlier ML Engineer / Senior Software Engineer at AKUR8 per his LinkedIn profile; both are index-only, self-reported role entries, not independently confirmed by a primary source.Aug 2023
• Defended his PhD thesis 'The maximal growth of automorphic periods and oscillatory integrals for maximal flat submanifolds' at Universite Sorbonne Paris Nord on 18 July 2022, supervised by Farrell Brumley; he then started as a postdoc at Universitat Bonn in October 2022 in Valentin Blomer's group.Oct 2022
• Represented Belgium at the 54th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2013, Santa Marta, Colombia); listed as an IMO participant (imo-official.org participant id 23343) and on the Belgian olympiad site's IMO 2013 results page. No medal level was confirmed from the sources checked.Jul 2013
• AKUR8, his current employer, is an actuarial AI platform for insurance pricing ('The Global Actuarial AI Platform'), i.e. insurance/actuarial software, not a quantitative trading, market-making, or hedge-fund firm.2026
• Identity disambiguation: a different, London-based marketing executive also named Bart Michels (CEO of Kantar Consulting, later Executive Director of MSQ) dominates name searches; all UK-marketing hits were excluded, as were an unrelated Belgian 'financieel medewerker' and several Dutch namesakes.2022
• Has published in analytic number theory and automorphic forms: 'Extreme values of geodesic periods on arithmetic hyperbolic surfaces' (J. Inst. Math. Jussieu, 2020) and preprints on maximal flat submanifolds of symmetric spaces (arXiv 2206.07408, 2206.07409).2022
• Maintains GitHub accounts 'bartmichels' (personal, hosting his site) and 'bartmichels-akur8' (work account tied to AKUR8), indicating ongoing software-engineering work.2026
• Runs a personal academic site at bartmichels.github.io (publications, theses and a math-notes page) and is an active user on Mathematics Stack Exchange and MathOverflow, consistent with his mathematical background.2022
• Co-founder of Flordi Coworking & Meeting Rooms (Ghent, listed from 2021) and a Math Olympiad trainer for the Vlaamse Wiskunde Olympiade (from 2014), both concurrent with his research and industry roles per his LinkedIn profile.2021