IMPA's scientific body is a babel of 14 nationalities.

Karine Rodrigues

If today IMPA is a melting pot, with researchers and students from all over the country and the world, in its early days it was represented by three distinct accents: Rio de Janeiro, Ceará, and Pernambuco. In October 1952, the institute was founded with director Lélio Gama (1892-1981), from Rio de Janeiro, and two senior researchers: Maurício Peixoto, from Fortaleza, and Leopoldo Nachbin (1922-1993), from Recife. The scientific staff also included assistants Paulo Ribenboim and Carlos Benjamin de Lyra (1927-1974), both from the same region as Nachbin.

The first associate researchers and research assistants emerged at the end of the 1960s. Jonas Gomes, a member of the IMPA Board of Directors, began his career in this way, in the mid-1970s. According to his testimony in the book "IMPA 50 years," even back then a doctorate was required to be a researcher at IMPA.

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“The Institute had a position called research assistant – offered to doctoral students who were doing well in the course and were hired to help in master's courses, mainly by teaching exercises,” explained Gomes, who after his doctorate became a senior researcher and created Visgraf, IMPA's computer graphics laboratory, now coordinated by Luiz Velho.

In the same book, Elon Lages Lima considers the 1970s to be the beginning of what he called the glorious years, when, according to him, IMPA began to have a regular production of doctoral graduates and to be seen as a respectable research institution. By the end of the decade, the total number of tenured researchers reached 32. Other research areas were added, increasing the list that already included Dynamical Systems, Differential Geometry, and Algebra.

“I remained as director, Jacob Palis directed the seminars on Dynamical Systems, Manfredo do Carmo (1928-2018) in Geometry, Otto Endler (1929-1988) in Algebra, Karl-Otto-Stöhr in Algebraic Geometry,” Lima recounts, highlighting the arrival of foreign researchers: “We managed to attract several American and English mathematicians who spent long periods collaborating with us, drawn by the quality of the work that was beginning to be done in new areas.”

Aloisio Araujo, a senior researcher in the field of Mathematical Economics, emphasizes in the same publication that the excellence of IMPA's scientific body is rooted in the institution's origins.

“From its very foundation, practically, fabulous mathematicians came to Brazil, such as Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002), for example, a great French mathematician who gave a lecture when I was still a student. Steve Smale (Fields Medal in 1966) did a good part of his scientific work at IMPA, 'on the sands of Copacabana,' as he recounts. Even in economics, several Nobel laureates visited IMPA; on the day he received the news that he had won the Nobel Prize (in 2000), James Heckman was at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, and the day before he had been at IMPA working with me. Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in 2001) and Kenneth Arrow (1921-2017, Nobel Prize in 1972) gave lectures here.”

Today, IMPA has 49 researchers (30 full professors, 10 associate professors, 2 extraordinary professors, 3 emeritus professors, 3 honorary professors, and 1 adjunct professor) from 14 nationalities. Throughout its 66 years of existence, another 52 distinguished researchers have been part of the institution, which is recognized worldwide for its excellence.

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