16/01/2020

In her seventh country, 'gypsy' Luna Lomonaco arrives at IMPA.

Luiza Barata

A handwritten note, taped to the door of room 334 at IMPA, announces that the space has a new occupant: Luna Lomonaco. The place will still receive books and personal belongings, but the researcher already feels almost at home. "It's my goal for 2020!" Having recently arrived from São Paulo, where she spent the last five years, the Italian is still in the final stages of moving in.

In 2019, Luna became the first woman to receive the Brazilian Mathematical Society (SBM) Award, which recognizes the best original research work in the field. The mathematician works with research in dynamical systems and wants to understand processes about the behavior of an object that, in a way, encodes changes in other objects. “I research fractals. What motivates me to do this research are the questions I've been asked throughout my life. It's the questions that choose you: some stay in your head, others don't.”

The researcher also enjoys meditating, is a classical soprano – she has participated in some recitals but says she is “still learning” – and considers herself a “gypsy at heart”. The first time she had to move was at age 9, when her family left Milan for Peschiera Del Garde, a town of just over 8,000 inhabitants in northeastern Italy.

“It was a very difficult change. Imagine leaving Milan for a small town in the countryside, where everyone knows each other, knows everything about everyone… I was almost a teenager and I remember that everyone in the class had grown up together. I felt left out of it. I wanted to question everything, and that bothered the class and the teachers. People would say, 'Who is she? She asks too many questions!'” the mathematician recounts. “In high school, things improved a little, but I still felt caged in that small town.”

Luna remained "inquisitive" throughout the seven countries where she lived during her academic career: Italy, Spain, Denmark, France, China, the United States, before arriving in Brazil. "In childhood, I didn't imagine myself as a mathematician. I didn't even know it was a profession. At the end of high school, I thought about careers ranging from journalism to science, but I had no idea what I would do as a scientist. I had the ambition to leave, travel the world, and do things. But do what? That I didn't really know," she confesses with good humor.

“In the final years of school in Italy, we choose between vocational, technical, or high school. Within high school, there are three other types: classical; scientific, which focuses on mathematics and linguistics; and linguistic, which focuses on Greek, Latin, philosophy, and history.” And it was during philosophy classes that Luna began to connect with numbers.

“It bothered me that many philosophers thought they were always inaugurating new concepts. As if they thought, 'What was done before me is worthless. What I do is valuable.' It seemed a bit limited and arrogant to me. Mathematics seemed to me something that people actually worked together to discover something. We're not going to start over every time. Just because we now realize that Euclidean geometry isn't the only possible one, doesn't mean Euclid was an idiot. No, Euclid was a genius.”

Scholarship in Spain saved my career.

During her undergraduate studies at the University of Padua (UNIPD), Luna reveals having experienced some discouraging days. “I would arrive with philosophical questions and find integral matrices… What had I gotten myself into?!” she laughs. “The professors wanted the class to memorize things. It wasn't intuitive at all, and the university wasn't what I imagined during the first year. In one assessment, I questioned my final grade, wanting to know if my mistakes were calculation errors, at least to see if the procedure was correct. I heard the following phrase: 'If you intend to graduate in mathematics, you should at least know the four fundamental operations.'”

On the verge of giving up on her career, Luna secured an Erasmus scholarship through the International Cooperation Program funded by the European Commission to study in Spain. “I thought that if I could spend some time outside of Italy, I would have less time left to finish my degree. It would be more worthwhile than starting another degree from scratch.” The researcher went to the University of Barcelona, completed some semesters of her undergraduate studies, and ended up pursuing a master's degree in mathematics. “The professors there started answering my questions, which increased my interest. But even so, I didn't see myself as a mathematician. So much so that, during my master's, I took several vocational courses to work in banks or the financial market. Along the way, I worked in restaurants to pay the bills and did an internship at a 3D film company.”

It was then that a French friend recommended me for a doctoral scholarship. “One fine day, I knocked on the door of the professor he had recommended and introduced myself. I said that I loved dynamical systems – which I didn't really know what it was. In the end, I didn't get the scholarship, but I was recommended for another opportunity in Denmark.”

China

At the end of the experience, Luna felt uneasy about the "gaps" that had remained during her specialization. "There was a lot of stuff I still didn't know properly. I felt like a fraud." But the opportunity for a scholarship at the Chinese Academy of Sciences finally allowed the researcher to begin to recognize herself professionally. "I was able to research the things I wanted and find myself, in a way. I was an outsider for seven months in China, and that was very good. They respected my space, and I respected theirs."

While still in China, Luna turned to an American professor who recommended the University of São Paulo (USP) for her to look for a job. “I had never been to Brazil. I thought, 'Let's go, why not?!'” At the same time, she received a postdoctoral offer in Rome, which wouldn't provide stability for very long. “Arno was my boyfriend at the time and was doing his doctorate in physics. He knew the academic scene better than I did and said: 'We can choose Italy. I'll stay home, learn to make pasta, and if we have a child, I'll stay home with the baby.' I looked at him and said: 'Wonderful, let's go to Brazil!'”

On April 24, 2014, a date she remembers perfectly, Luna arrived in São Paulo. At the end of September, Arno packed his bags and came to join her. “We met in Denmark. He’s Dutch and was in Denmark doing research. There, people usually start their postgraduate studies a little later, already with children and families. We were some of the few single people in the class, so when we wanted to go to a bar, who could go? Him and me. During the World Cup, who was available to watch the games? Him and me. Game after game… and everything happened. We got married.”

'It's really awful that the day only has 24 hours'

Upon becoming a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), Luna intensified her meditation sessions. “You start to understand how awful it is that the day only has 24 hours, the hour only 60 minutes, and the week only seven days. The last few years of my life have been wonderful, but very hectic. Perhaps doing too much doesn't necessarily mean producing well. And that's where meditation comes into my life. I do it for seven minutes at home, with the help of YouTube videos. I tend to be very fast-paced and perfectionist,” she reveals.

Among her achievements, Luna cites the article she wrote with her doctoral advisor, Carsten Lunde Petersen, which earned her one of her main academic rewards: the SBM Mathematics Prize. “But a super important work that gave me confidence, certainty, and the well-being of being in the right career was the publication with Shaum Bullet, ' Mating quadratic maps with the modular group II ', in the journal Inventiones Mathematicae .”

She and Shaum started working together in 2011, when she was pursuing her doctorate. “Even English, at the beginning, was a problem for us to communicate. When I found out that the article had been accepted, in 2019, I had a wonderful feeling of 'okay, I can do it, I am capable'. Because we researched a topic that nobody was looking at, but that we managed to divide well: him with the algebraic topology part, me with the dynamical systems,” says Lu na, who in the same year was selected by the Serrapilheira Institute to receive a grant of R$ 100,000.

Crédito: Divulgação Instituto Serrapilheira

The researcher is deeply moved by her classmates from the USP Complex Dynamical Systems course in the last semester. “For the final evaluation, I asked the students to submit projects. I get goosebumps just thinking about it: they handed in fantastic studies, they really wanted to reciprocate my effort in class, and it worked. I cried a lot when we said goodbye,” she recalls fondly.

Saying goodbye to her students in São Paulo wasn't easy, but Luna is prepared for the challenges ahead. “At USP, we had a group of professors where everyone tried to help each other. I hope to find that here because I've always dreamed of this moment.” Her first visit to IMPA was during the Summer Course. “I was in Enrique Pujals' class. He was talking to a doctoral student when I heard a student say, 'it's like the work of ants.' From then on, Pujals gave an entire lecture on how ants behave and related it to game theory. I thought: this is where I want to be.”

For 2020, the mathematician's main goal is to adapt to her new life after going through so many changes. "I live in Copacabana and initially I'll be making weekend trips to São Paulo while Arno isn't permanently settled here," she says enthusiastically.