16/08/2021

Mathematician Clóvis Gonzaga dies at age 76.

Imagem: UFSC

Professor Clóvis Caesar Gonzaga, from the Department of Mathematics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), died at the age of 76. A native of Lages (SC), Gonzaga worked in the areas of mathematical optimization and control theory, and became one of the world's leading experts in continuous optimization. As a professor at COPPE-UFRJ, he worked for years on graph search algorithms and their application to electrical power system planning problems.

“Clóvis was an excellent mathematician and played an important role in Optimization in Brazil. He was also an easy-going and pleasant person. We met more than two decades ago on the CNPq Advisory Committee, where we developed a friendly relationship that we maintained over the years,” commented Marcelo Viana, Director-General of IMPA.

The son of a lawyer and a high school teacher, Gonzaga lived in Joinville until 1963, when he left to study Electronic Engineering at the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA) in São José dos Campos. In 1968, he enrolled as a student at COPPE-UFRJ, where he later became a professor. During his master's and doctoral studies, he studied continuous and discrete optimization.

He completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976, working on semi-infinite optimization. In 1985, he became a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the American university. During this period, he developed a low-complexity algorithm for Linear Programming that surpassed the one developed by the Indian mathematician Narendra Karmarkar.

He was a visiting professor at other institutions, including the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, the University of Paris I – Sorbonne, and INRIA in Paris. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Mathematical Programming Society, the CNPq Mathematics Advisory Committee, and vice-president of the Brazilian Society of Applied and Computational Mathematics (SBMAC).

Source: Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC)