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Silvio Levy was born in 1959 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received an M.A. in Mathematics from IMPA in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1985. In 1988 he became half the staff of the nascent Geometry Supercomputer Project, which later grew into the Geometry Center. He started working for MSRI in 1995.

Silvio's chief professional goal is to further the communication of mathematics, by both traditional and novel means. He writes expository articles in mathematics and computer science, and was one of the directors of the award-winning animation Outside In. He has authored or co-authored the following books: Making Waves (an introduction to differential topology designed to accompany Outside In), A Beginner's Book of TeX (with Raymond Seroul), The CWEB System of Literate Programming (with Don Knuth), and Word Processing in Groups (with David Epstein and others). He has also translated over a dozen books into English (from French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and Russian).

In addition to editing the MSRI book series, Silvio works for Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a Berkeley nonprofit publisher he helped found in 2003. Prior to that, he was the Editor of Experimental Mathematics from its foundation in 1991 until the end of 2000.

Silvio lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife Sheila Newbery, a photographer whose new blog shows some of her favorites. Their son Andrew (age has degrees in music from UC Berkeley and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.