Opening session of PSPDE's IX, 2021, Braga, Portugal (here , as a loving memory)
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By José Francisco Rodrigues (CMAFcIO/Matemática/Ciências/ULisboa)
Maria da Conceiçăo Vieira de Carvalho (1956-2021)
Maria da Conceição Vieira de Carvalho, a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, since 1990, a researcher at the Center for Mathematics, Fundamental Applications and Operations Research since 2005, and a permanent visiting researcher at Rutgers University since 2007, where she had been telecommuting to her home in Princeton, USA, since the beginning of the pandemic, died on June 28, 2021.
Maria Carvalho graduated in 1978 in Mathematics, in the specialty of Mechanics and Physics-Mathematics, when the undergraduate degree corresponded to the current Master's degree, and received her PhD in Mathematics in 1990, also from the University of Lisboa. Maria Carvalho, as she often signed her name in the 34 research papers she published during her life, stood out as a specialist in Mathematical Analysis applied to statistical mechanics, probability theory and stochastic processes, and equations with partial derivatives, in particular the Boltzmann equation.
She has published articles in journals with great impact on mathematical sciences, such as Acta Mathematica, Archives for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Journal of Statistical Physics or Communication on Pure and Applied Mathematics, and in 2010 she published a paper with Fields Medalist Cédric Villani, in Kinetic and Related Models, being one of the teachers and researchers of Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon with greater internationalization and participation in national and European projects of mathematical research at the highest level. Maria Carvalho was invited to participate in the conference on New Trends in Nonlinear Diffusion: Bridge between PDEs, Analysis and Geometry, Banff International Research Center in September 2021.
In addition to her scientific activity and other university activities at Sciences ULisboa, Maria Carvalho, over four decades, has been a dedicated teacher and lecturer of various disciplines in virtually all undergraduate courses at the Faculty of Sciences, having published in 2006, in collaboration with Eric Carlen, the book Linear Algebra from the Beginning, for Scientists and Engineers, by the American publisher W. H. Freeman, which was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil in 2009. She was also the co-organizer of 15 international scientific meetings, namely the series Particle Systems and PDE's, whose 9th edition was planned for November 2021, and also a Summer School on Mass Transportation Methods in Kinetic Theory and Hydrodynamics, in Ponta Delgada, in September 2000, which resulted in the co-edition, with J. F. Rodrigues, of the homonymous book published with the number 353 in the Contemporary Mathematics collection of the American Mathematical Society.
At the Faculty of Sciences/ULisboa, her legacy remains, and among her colleagues and friends, the memory and the saudade remain.
José Francisco Rodrigues (CMAFcIO/Matemática/Ciências/ULisboa)
Text in Portuguese available here