17/11/2022

IMPA Tech: 'A democratic way to serve the country,' says Viana.

The mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, and the director-general of IMPA, Marcelo Viana, presented this Thursday (17) details of the Porto Maravalley ( Pomar) project – an undertaking, located in the Port region of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, which will house the first undergraduate course at IMPA, in addition to a series of high-tech startups, companies and investor offices.

The institute's bachelor's degree program, which will last four years, will be entirely free, and student selection will be based primarily on student performance in academic olympiads, including the OBMEP (Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools), promoted by IMPA since 2005.

“IMPA’s objective is to help fill the gap that Brazil has for young mathematical talents. The proposal here is to offer an excellent bachelor’s degree with innovative academic production. We want the students’ performance in knowledge olympiads, particularly the OBMEP, to have significant weight in the selection of these students. It is a democratic way of embracing the entire country, since the OBMEP includes students from all over the national territory and observes reasoning ability, not just knowledge. Therefore, the school each student attends is less important than their knowledge,” stated Viana.

In total, 100 students will be selected annually for the undergraduate program and awarded a scholarship. Construction on the facility, which began this Thursday, is expected to be completed next year. The undergraduate program is scheduled to begin in the first semester of 2024.

The course will consist of a basic cycle in the first few years, after which students will choose one of four specializations: Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, and Physics.

Viana emphasized that the project is part of the institution's natural development cycle, which has increasingly strengthened its ties with the productive sector. "We are becoming more and more involved in the transfer of mathematics; of production processes; in the transfer of knowledge to solve concrete problems."

The mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, addressed the importance of IMPA in the region, which will occupy the largest part of the development.

“It will be a milestone in the development of Rio. You will have the OBMEP, which is incredible, and it will be the main selection element for those who come to study here. It is an opportunity for those who come from public schools, who face all kinds of difficulties and barriers, and will be able to study at one of the best mathematics faculties in the world. We have to realize this: IMPA is compared to Harvard and other sophisticated universities, and now it is coming to Porto in a democratic way to train students in mathematics, which is the science of the future.”

Porto Maravalley

The space, named Porto Maravalley, was inspired by regions such as Silicon Valley in California, USA. The development will be located on a property owned by Companhia Carioca de Parcerias e Investimentos (CCpar), ceded by the municipality, and will cover 10,000 square meters.

The Rio de Janeiro city government will invest a total of R$ 30 million in the space, which will be managed by a governance council similar to the one that operates the Museum of Tomorrow in Praça Mauá. The council will define, for example, which startups will be part of the space. Companies that set up shop there may benefit from a reduced ISS (municipal service tax): from 5% to 2%.

The municipal secretary of Development, Innovation and Simplification, Chicão Bulhões, described the project as a watershed moment for Rio and said he expects the future Nobel Prize winner to be part of the project. He also reminded the audience that the only Latin American to win the Fields Medal – the highest honor in mathematics – was Artur Avila, a researcher at IMPA.

The expectation is that Pomar will have 1,000 entrepreneurs, more than 200 startups, and generate over 5,000 jobs.