IMPA’S COMING OF AGE IN A CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL RECONFIGURATION OF MATHEMATICS

Abstract

In the middle of the 20th century, the intimate link between science, industry and the state was stimulated, in its technical-scientific dimension, by the Cold War. Questions of a similar strategic nature were involved in the Brazilian political scene, when the CNPq was created. This presentation investigates the nature of the connection between this scientific policy and the presumed need for an advanced research institute in mathematics, that gave birth to IMPA. By retracing the scientific choices of the few mathematicians working at the institute in its first twenty years, we demonstrate how they paralleled the ongoing reconfiguration of scientific research. The development of dynamical systems theory provides a telling example of internationalization strategies which situated IMPA within a research network full of resources, that furnished, moreover, a modernizing drive adapted to the air of that time. On October 19, 1952, O Jornal do Comércio, a newspaper published in Brazil’s then capital city of Rio de Janeiro, reported that the National Research Council (CNP, Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas) had created an associated research arm called the Institute for Pure and AppliedMathematics (IMPA, Instituto deMatemática Pura e Aplicada). The National Research Council, later known as CNPq, had been created just a year beforehand and was directly connected to the country’s government. On the same day, the first pages of the newspaper reported: • The Soviet delegate presented a proposal for peace at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Andrei Vyshinsky called for a reduction of one-third of the armaments of the great powers and an unconditional ban on atomic weapons. The “peace pact” would be a condition to stop the then ongoing Korean War;