27/10/2017

When mathematical equations become art.

Accustomed to the routine of a doctoral student at IMPA, which he completed last year, mathematician Fernando Nera Lenarduzzi experienced something different over the past three days. He switched places and became the professor himself.

It was up to him, who is currently doing postdoctoral research at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), to reveal to the students who came to IMPA to participate in the National Science and Technology Week program the beauty of Mathematics contained in the Imaginary exhibition.

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Among the works on display, Fernando, a researcher in the field of Dynamical Systems – “like Artur Ávila, Jacob Palis, Marcelo Viana” – included the “Lorenz Attractor” and the “Hecatonicosachoron”, a four-dimensional sphere projected in three dimensions.

The story of the Lorenz Attractor dates back to the 1960s. At the time, Fernando recounts, the American Edward Lorenz (1917-2008) developed a very simple mathematical model to investigate the problem of convection in the Earth's atmosphere. And in it he saw the sensitive dependence on initial conditions: chaos.

“Each point in the image shows a different atmospheric condition. It would be expected, then, that nearby points would also present very similar conditions. But that is not what happens. They move further apart over time and become completely different,” he says, pointing to the bluish image that shows how the state of a dynamic system evolves over time in a chaotic pattern.

Like Fernando, IMPA doctoral student Dyego Soares, specializing in probability, showed the students that mathematics is everywhere. In origami, for example. It was his job to demonstrate how fun it is to learn plane and spatial geometry by constructing figures with colored paper.