31/01/2022

Leopoldo Nachbin's career was marked by unprecedented achievements.

Leopoldo Nachbin (1922-1993), from Pernambuco, founder of prominent institutions such as IMPA and the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF), would have turned 100 this January. He died in April 1993 and became known for "Nachbin's Theorem," with a career marked by groundbreaking achievements. He was the first Brazilian to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1962. That same year, he also became the first mathematician to receive the Moinho Santista Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the country's intellectual production. A graduate in engineering from the University of Brazil (now UFRJ), he published numerous textbooks and nearly one hundred articles in mathematics.

His main area of expertise was holomorphy in infinite spaces – polynomial functions in unequal spaces, used in integral calculations (in engineering, physics, chemistry, and applied mathematics). But he also contributed to several other areas of the discipline, becoming one of the greatest Brazilian mathematicians with international recognition. One of the researcher's most influential works addressed the Hahn-Banach theorem for applications in normed spaces and was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.

Nachbin was born in Recife on January 7, 1922, and began to show an interest in mathematics while still in school. It was also during this period that he befriended a classmate who would become an illustrious writer: Clarice Lispector. In her chronicle "The Great Punishments ," Clarice recalls her friendship with Nachbin, whom she considered "one of the greatest mathematicians in the world today."

In 1939, the Pernambuco native moved to Rio de Janeiro, and soon met Maurício Peixoto (1921-2019), who would also go on to found IMPA. In Rio de Janeiro, he studied engineering at the University of Brazil, during which time he published his first academic work at the age of 19. He graduated in 1948, and in the same year went to the United States to study at the University of Chicago, where he came into contact with renowned mathematicians such as André Weil, Jean Dieudonné, Marshall Harvey Stone, and Laurent Schwartz.

The 1950s were a particularly eventful decade for the researcher. In addition to being elected a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), he participated in the founding of CBPF in 1950 and two years later created IMPA alongside Peixoto and Lélio Gama (1892-1981 ). Former director of IMPA, Lindolpho de Carvalho Dias, describes Nachbin, with whom he worked during the institute's first decades, as an "excellent mathematician, extremely competent".

Another institution that benefited from the Pernambuco influence in its development was the Latin American School of Mathematics (ELAM), founded in 1967. A fundamental figure in the construction of Brazilian mathematical research, Nachbin was recognized with other important distinctions such as the Bernardo Houssay Scientific Prize, awarded by the Organization of American States (OAS).