18/02/2022

At ICM 2022, Landim talks about the popularization of mathematics.

The countdown to the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2022 , the world's leading mathematics event, has already begun. And with increasingly encouraging news! The event organizers, which will take place between July 6 and 14 in St. Petersburg (Russia), announced the deputy director of IMPA and general coordinator of OBMEP, Claudio Landim, as a speaker on the panel "Innovation and New Ways of Popularizing Mathematics," which is part of the "Mathematics Education and Popularization of Mathematics" section .

Landim, who had already debuted as a speaker at the event in the 2018 edition , held in Rio de Janeiro by IMPA, will talk about the role of OBMEP (Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools) in the education of young people in basic education. Also participating in the panel are the Russian Sergey Rukshin and the Frenchman Mickaël Launay, creator of the YouTube channel Micmaths . The conversation will be moderated by Raïssa Malu, a physicist from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I intend to describe the enormous logistical challenges of the competition and encourage emerging countries to adopt the initiative. It will be a unique opportunity to talk about OBMEP to the entire community,” celebrates the deputy director of IMPA. For Landim, the OBMEP awards ceremony held during ICM 2018 “gave some international visibility to the Olympiad,” and may have led to the invitation. “Russia has a long tradition in mathematics Olympiads and in the involvement of prominent scientists in basic education. This explains, in part, the quality of mathematics in the country,” he adds.

The section will feature two other panels: “Mathematical Sciences to Address Challenges and Social Issues” and “Balance between Classroom Education and Online Distance Learning,” in which the researcher from the University of São Paulo (USP), Marcelo Borba, will participate. The French researcher Hubert Lacoin, from IMPA, will also represent the institute at the event, with a lecture in the “Probability” section .

Claudio Landim, a native of Rio de Janeiro, has been a researcher at IMPA since 1994 and the institute's deputy director since 2008, working in the area of probability. A member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), he won the Mathematics Prize from the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World in 2006 and the commendation of the National Order of Scientific Merit in 2010. In 2019, he received the Science Education Prize for his significant and innovative contributions to educational science materials, such as the creation of the OBMEP Portal and the OBMEP in School Program.

The last edition of the ICM was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, bringing together more than 3,000 participants from 114 countries. Participants from five continents experienced a nine-day mathematical immersion at the Riocentro convention center. The scientific marathon featured 21 plenary presentations, 910 lectures, 435 short communications, and 475 posters. The event also hosted the Fields Medal ceremony, the most important distinction in the field, for mathematicians Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze, and Ashkay Venkateshda.