17/09/2024

Marcelo Campos' thesis wins the CAPES 2024 Award.

The doctoral thesis of IMPA researcher Marcelo Campos, defended at IMPA in 2023, won the 2024 CAPES Thesis Award in the area of Mathematics / Probability and Statistics. The 19th edition of the award aims to recognize the best doctoral dissertations defended in Brazil in each area of knowledge recognized by the foundation.

Titled "Random Matrices, Additive Combinatorics, and Convex Geometry ," the work, supervised by IMPA researcher Robert Morris, has eight chapters, each addressing a problem encompassing the sub-areas highlighted in the title. According to CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education), the "contribution will certainly be of extreme value for the development and improvement of the field, as well as for the advancement of stricto sensu postgraduate studies and quality scientific knowledge in Brazil."

Pleased with the distinction, Campos made a point of emphasizing that the work was the result of several partnerships. “ I felt it was a recognition of the work done during these years of doctoral studies. A good part of this work was done in collaboration with various researchers, since six of the eight chapters were collaborations.”

In total, the institution awarded 50 theses from different areas. Now, three works will be awarded the CAPES Grand Prize for Thesis related to each evaluation category: Life Sciences, Humanities and Exact Sciences, Technological and Multidisciplinary. The results will be announced in December, the same month in which the awards ceremony will take place.

With a PhD from IMPA and a research degree from the institute, Campos also holds a junior research position at Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford (England). His research has focused primarily on Ramsey theory, random matrix theory, convex geometry, probabilistic and additive combinatorics.

Advancement in Ramsey's Theorem

In January of last year, Campos, Morris, and researchers Simon Griffiths (PUC-Rio) and Julian Sahasrabudhe (Cambridge) arrived at a new algorithm capable of improving the limit of Ramsey's theorem, during the IMPA Summer Course. The result was the most significant in the field since 1935.

It didn't take long for the achievement to spread throughout the mathematical community.
William Timothy Gowers, winner of the Fields Medal in 1998, who worked on the same problem, acknowledged the group's progress. "Basically every combinatorics researcher has tried hard to answer this question, including myself," he wrote.

Shortly after, the feat graced the cover of the newspaper O Globo and was featured in articles in Folha de S.Paulo ; in the online edition of Revista Galileu , on Band TV, and also in Quanta Magazine .

In July, the results were presented at the 34th Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium. The lecture given by Campos and Simon was described by the audience as fun, educational, and surprising.

CAPES Award

Created in 2006, the CAPES Thesis Award has already recognized more than ten doctoral dissertations from IMPA as the best in the field of mathematics. The award offers a diploma, medal, and a national postdoctoral fellowship of up to 12 months for the thesis author.

The last work recognized was in the 2022 edition of the award, which selected the thesis of Letícia Dias Mattos , also supervised by Robert Morris, as the best dissertation of 2021 in the area of Mathematics / Probability and Statistics.

Titled “Combinatorial Properties of Random Graphs and Matrices ,” the work had already earned an honorable mention in the 2022 Gutierrez Prize . In her thesis, Letícia studied two of the main objects in probabilistic combinatorics: random matrices and random graphs.

André Chirre , Rangel Baldasso , Felipe Gonçalves , and Valdir Pereira Júnior were some of the institute's PhD holders who received awards in recent years.