05/09/2024

IMPA Tech brings innovation to the Mathematics Festival.

Alunos do IMPA Tech

IMPA Tech, the graduate program of the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, is participating in the National Mathematics Festival program, an event promoted by IMPA to present the discipline in an innovative, playful and fun way. Held at Marina da Glória, in Rio de Janeiro, the Festival is open to all audiences and runs until next Saturday (7).

Undergraduate students in Mathematics of Technology and Innovation presented the Xenolinguistics Project, a work developed in the first semester in the Linguistic Skills course, which dialogues with different areas of knowledge. “The main point is that everything is linked to mathematics and technology. And we can learn while having fun,” highlighted student Felipe Giehl, on the #FestMat stage, on the morning of this Thursday (5).

Under the guidance of Professor Cilene Rodrigues, the students developed different languages focused on specific needs, with morphemes and grammatical rules. The idea was to create hypothetical languages, the "alien languages," which have syntax similar to that of human languages, to learn the basics of grammar in a dynamic way.

Applying interdisciplinary skills, one of the projects used Minecraft, a video game that allows users to explore a three-dimensional, pixelated, procedurally generated world made of blocks. “Our project isn't related to another planet, but to a digital game. We created a language for the Minecraft universe, embedding the language within the software to improve teaching methods using games,” stated Giehl.

And mathematics is the foundation of everything. Numbers were fundamental to innovating and creating a functional communication system. “We defined sounds for the digits 0 to 7, since the Minecraft system works on base eight. With our language, the villagers in the game could use this system to pass coordinates of any point on their map,” he highlighted.

Asla Sá, academic manager of IMPA Tech, also participated in the Festival's program and showed how it is possible to visualize things that are beyond the human visible spectrum, in the lecture "Seeking to see the invisible". Through mathematics, she showed visitors 'mathematical tricks' to transform the invisible into visible.

Alsa Sá, gerente acadêmica do IMPA Tech

"The visible spectrum is a very small part of the electromagnetic signals that are in our daily lives. Much of it is invisible, such as microwaves and radio waves. Physics and chemistry have very cool solutions, but mathematics also has its tricks and can help us," he said.

X-rays and microscopes are widely used for medical purposes, but there are other ways to apply mathematics in everyday life. Asla highlighted that digital images and graphical representation can be a trick, as they facilitate the visualization of data from large databases and generate new interpretations. "In a way, any matrix of numbers can be an image, and this can be a trick to see the invisible," he stated.

Asla also showed that the discipline functions like hardware , enabling new powers and possibilities of perception. “Mathematics can be a kind of armor like Iron Man's. Once you equip yourself with mathematics, you gain certain powers. And we are in a reality where some of these technologies are already accessible. Here at the Festival, these powers are transformed into sensations that you can experience.”

Infrared, which some birds and animals already possess naturally in their visual system, can be used to generate new images visible to the naked eye, for example. "It is in this sense that mathematics can function as a superpower, bringing invisible information and data into the visible realm. Through applications of the discipline, we can transform massive amounts of data into tangible information," concluded Asla.