19/10/2018

IMPA welcomes students during National Science and Technology Week.

With the theme “Science for reducing inequalities”, the National Science and Technology Week (SNCT) 2018 arrived at IMPA this Friday (19).

The activities began early in the morning with the lecture "What does a mathematician do?", by the director-general of IMPA, Marcelo Viana, aimed at an audience of students from public and private schools in Rio de Janeiro.

In a playful manner, Viana explained that Mathematics is not just any "profession," but an important way to have fun and an area capable of generating wealth for a country.

To corroborate this information, Viana presented the results of a survey conducted in England by Deloitte on how mathematics contributes to the economy. The research shows that 16% of the English GDP is a result of mathematics and related professions, representing approximately R$ 1 trillion.

A very different reality from that found in Brazil. Viana highlighted that while in European countries 40% of students have the scientific knowledge to work in areas related to the discipline, in Brazil this figure does not exceed 3.8% – according to PISA data.

To try and change this situation and encourage young people, Marcelo Viana explained that mathematics plays an important role in people's lives. For example, smartphones are viable because they involve a lot of mathematics, from their production to the signal we use to communicate through them.

In order to demonstrate this in a tangible way, he organized a game with groups of students using dominoes. The challenge for the groups was to create a circle using all the pieces. However, some sets were missing the pieces numbered 4, and others were missing the pieces numbered 5.

The teams with the complete sets quickly succeeded. The teams without the number 4 pieces also did. But the team without the number 5 pieces couldn't complete the challenge. And that's where math comes in.

Viana explains that it is only possible to win the game with even edges, and the theory for this emerged in 1736 when the Swiss scientist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was called upon to solve the problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg, located in Prussia, present-day Germany, and ended up creating graph theory.

Königsberg, bisected by the Pregolia River, has two large islands that form a complex which at the time included seven bridges. At the time, people wanted to know if it was possible to cross all the bridges without repeating any. Local legend said it was, but Euler proved that no route existed that would allow for such restrictions.

To do this, the Swiss mathematician transformed the paths into lines and their intersections into points—possibly creating the first graph in history. He realized that it would only be possible to traverse the entire path by crossing each bridge only once if there were exactly zero or two points from which an odd number of paths branched out.

Interesting, right? The coolest thing about all this is that graph theory, which emerged from this problem in a small German town, is essential in the production of the microchips in the cell phones we're always wearing. It's math galore!

Origami workshop

After Marcelo Viana's lecture, the students had fun and learned more mathematics in the modular origami workshop with Dyego Soares, a doctoral student at IMPA.

Origami is a traditional Japanese art of folding paper to create representations of beings or objects using geometric folds in a single piece of paper. It's no wonder it's widely used in math classes.

In the workshop, the young people learned how to make a cube from six modular pieces and also received tips on how to create other shapes with the same pieces.