Elon Lages Lima

Elon Lages Lima was a Brazilian mathematician who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1929. He studied engineering at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo, graduating in 1934. He then worked as a professor and researcher at the same institution, where he founded the Department of Physics in 1936. He also collaborated with the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) and the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT). He published many papers on various topics of physics, such as thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, astrophysics and mathematics. He was particularly interested in the foundations of quantum theory and the interpretation of quantum phenomena. He also developed a geometric algebra that could unify the different branches of physics and mathematics. He was a close friend and colleague of David Bohm, with whom he discussed the implications of quantum theory for philosophy and psychology. He started his activities as a science communicator in the 1930s, writing for the magazine Chacaras e Quintaes. In 1947, he began a column of science divulgation in the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, which he maintained for 55 years, until his death. He also wrote books and pamphlets for the general public, explaining the concepts and discoveries of science and medicine. He was one of the founders and presidents of the Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC), an organization that promotes scientific research and education in Brazil. He was also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences of the Third World. He received many awards and honors for his contributions to science and society, such as the Order of Scientific Merit from the Brazilian government in 1971, and the Kalinga Prize from UNESCO in 1979. He died of natural causes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2017, at the age of 87. He is regarded as one of the most influential and respected Brazilian mathematicians and a pioneer of dynamical systems theory. He developed the Peixoto's Theorem, which characterizes the structurally stable vector fields on compact surfaces, and the Peixoto's conjecture, which states that every vector field on a compact surface can be approximated by a Morse-Smale vector field. ¹