08/08/2023

'I want to encourage research in Ecuador,' says doctoral student.

At the age of 15, Eddy Santiago decided he would become a PhD in mathematics. His path to realizing his teenage dream involved requests for math books as birthday gifts; participation in international university olympiads; graduation from the University of San Francisco de Quito; and moving to Brazil, where he began his master's degree and later his doctorate at IMPA.

Born in Quito, Ecuador, Santiago says he first encountered IMPA during the Ibero-American Inter-University Mathematics Competition (CIIM) in 2016. A year later, encouraged by a friend, the Ecuadorian decided to expedite the completion of his mathematics degree to get to the institute as quickly as possible and begin his master's degree in pure mathematics.

This Wednesday (9), at 10 am, Santiago defends the thesis “Singular Toric Lagrangian Fibrations in the smoothing of algebraic cones” under the supervision of advisor Vinicius Ramos (IMPA) and co-advisor Renato Vianna (UFRJ). The presentation will take place in room 232 at the institute and will be broadcast live on IMPA's YouTube channel.

In his work, the doctoral candidate presents a construction of special Lagrangian fibrations in the smoothing of Gorenstein singularities. The construction was initially described by Gross, with additional details studied from the perspective of the SYZ mirror symmetry conjecture in subsequent works. The research presents an innovative description of the Gross fibration, using global coordinates associated with Altmann's characterization of the smoothing, which allows for alternative proofs of known facts about these fibers, the construction of a convex basis diagram that generalizes those already constructed by Symington, and the proof of a theorem that completely characterizes its form,” summarizes the doctoral candidate.

Now, Santiago is heading to Sweden to pursue a postdoctoral degree at Uppsala University. He carries with him the dream of one day returning to Ecuador and contributing to the development of scientific research in the country where he was born.

“I want to take advantage of this time to do more research, because in Ecuador it’s difficult to find work as a researcher. Most professors there only teach at universities. So, I’m going to take advantage of this postdoctoral period, and in the future I plan to return to Ecuador and encourage research in the country.”

For the student, the six years in Brazil were a time of inspiration and learning.

“When there are researchers in the city or country, you can develop a relationship between the community and the researchers, and I see this here in Brazil with IMPA, which has OBMEP and events like the Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium, which attract many students and allow them to interact with very good researchers of international caliber. Mathematics is a channel to reach other areas as well. It's an interesting door to explore, and not all countries have this structure like Brazil does,” the doctoral student points out.