Idris Assani is a Beninese mathematician, who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[1][2] He joined the UNC mathematics department in 1988 but, allegedly for racist reasons, was turned down for tenure.
He appealed through the courts, won his case and gained tenure in 1995, and was promoted to full professor one year later.
He has made numerous contributions in the area of nonconventional ergodic averages as well as the return times theorem.
Some of the highlights of his research contributions include pointwise convergence of averages along cubes,[4] being “the first complete pointwise convergence result obtained in the theory of nonconventional ergodic averages”,[5] as well as the introduction of Wiener-Wintner Dynamical System [6] and,[7] which is a class of dynamical system where one can obtain easier proofs of pointwise convergence results in more general setting (with difficult proofs), such as J. Bourgain’s double recurrence theorem as well as the return times theorem.