Maurício Peixoto
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maurício Matos Peixoto, born in April 15th of 1921, in Fortaleza, Ceará, is a Brazilian engineer who pursued a bright career as a mathematician. He pioneered the studies on structural stability.
Once, while talking with his mentor, the Russian Solomon Lefschetz, Maurício Peixoto commented that no one cared about structural stability of dynamic systems and that was the main problem in working with it. But to Peixoto's surprise Lefschetz's answer was no less than "No Mauricio, this is no trouble, this is your luck. Try to work as hard and as fast as you can on this subject because the day will come when you will not understand a single word of what they will be saying about structural stability; this happened to me in topology." Lefschetz's support was very important to Peixoto at the time. In 1957, Peixoto went to research the subject with Lefschetz at the Princeton University, where he spent uncountable hours talking to the Russian professor about Mathematics and other subjects. Despite of the great age difference (Peixoto was 36 years old and Lefschetz 73), they became good friends.
With Lefschetz incentive, Peixoto wrote his first paper on structural stability, that would be later published on the Annals of Mathematics, of which Lefschetz was editor. In 1958, they went to the International Mathematics Congress, in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Lefschetz introduced Peixoto to the Russian mathematician Lev Pontrjagin, whose work on dynamic systems was used by Peixoto as a basis for his studies. Pontrjagin, though, showed no interest whatsoever in Peixoto's work.
Back to Princeton, Peixoto met Steve Smale, the mathematician that would later become a reference in dynamic systems. Smale was interested in Peixoto's work and realized he could extend his own based on it. Their contact intensified and, when Peixoto came back to Brazil, the american mathematician spent six months at IMPA (Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada - Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics - at Rio de Janeiro). Through Smale, Peixoto would meet the French mathematician René Thom, who would help Peixoto to formulate his theorem, that was finalized during Thom's visit to IMPA.
In 1987, Peixoto was awarded by the Third World Science Academy, "for his fundamental and pioneer studies on structural stability in dynamic systems, in particular for proving that the superficial fluxes are generically structurally stable."
