Lewin studied mathematics at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, receiving his master's degree in 2000. He then received his PhD in 2004 at the Paris Dauphine University (Dauphine-Paris) PhD under the direction of Éric Séré. His dissertation was titled Some Nonlinear Models in quantum mechanics. From 2004 to 2005 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen under Jan Philip Solovej. From 2005, he conducted research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, then at the Paris-Dauphine university.
In July 2012, he was awarded an EMS Prize "for his ground breaking work in rigorous aspects of quantum chemistry, mean field approximations to relativistic quantum field theory and statistical mechanics".
Lenzmann, Enno; Lewin, Mathieu (2010). "Minimizers for the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory of neutron stars and white dwarfs". Duke Mathematical Journal. 152 (2). Duke University Press: 257–315. arXiv:0809.2560. doi:10.1215/00127094-2010-013. S2CID15321236.