29/07/2025

Informative lectures combine didacticism and friendliness at the 35th CBM.

Sympathy, good humor and laughter marked the two outreach lectures, which took place this Tuesday (29), at the 35th Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium, at IMPA. Researcher at Princeton University, in the United States, Ana Menezes addressed minimal surfaces and surfaces of constant mean curvature in three-dimensional homogeneous spaces and presented classic results, as well as the most recent contributions in the area. Emotionally, the mathematician said that she participated in the 31st edition of the Colloquium, in 2017, and said she was very happy to return to the institute where she completed her doctorate.

“It’s great to see that IMPA continues with the same energy. I hope that the younger people, who are still deciding which area to pursue, have become interested and that we can find people in the field. That’s always the goal of the outreach lecture. We try to win over young students. Differential geometry, for example, is an area that takes a while for students to come into contact with. Number theory or analysis are areas we see when we enter university, and geometry gets left behind. So, this lecture is very important to show that it’s cool and has many problems. It’s a promising area,” explained Ana.

Iuri Salles, who is in the final stretch of his undergraduate studies at UFABC ( Federal University of ABC ), was enthusiastic about the outreach lecture. " I think geometry is the most beautiful thing mathematics has ever created; it's the queen of all areas, along with number theory. So, I found it very cool and educational," said the event participant.

Another highlight of the day was the presentation by José Ramón Madrid Padilla. Originally from Honduras, the researcher from Virginia Tech in the United States shared his academic journey with the audience, a journey that spanned continents, involved languages he didn't master, and other challenges. “I learned about IMPA through the Mathematics Olympiad. I arrived at the institute when I was 16 years old, very young. The intention was to spend two months, but in reality, those two months turned into more than six years. This gives an idea of IMPA's reach.”

At the institute, Padilla completed his master's and doctorate degrees. This Tuesday (29), he presented the outreach lecture “Analysis on the hypercube” and discussed some analytical inequalities series for subsets and real-valued functions. The presentation also won praise from the audience.

"The lecture was a lot of fun. I find these topics in number theory and combinatorics very cool. It was a light lecture, without many prerequisites, and I was able to understand everything deeply. I was very happy to attend," said an enthusiastic Marcos Túlio Barbosa Abreu, a student at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais).

Doctoral candidate Frederico Cansado (UFMG) shared the same impressions. “It was great. The topics are related to my area of Combinatorics, but also very much related to Analysis. I liked it a lot because it presented tools from other areas to deal with the subjects I research.”

The 35th edition of the Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium began this Monday (28) and will run until Friday (1st) at IMPA. This year, the event has 1,500 registered participants who will be able to attend more than 200 presentations including plenary sessions, introductory and advanced courses, thematic sessions and roundtables. See the program here.