Professor Nelson Maculan opens season of seminars
Former rector of UFRJ spoke to IMPA Tech students on Tuesday (24)
Professor emeritus and former rector of UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Nelson Maculan, inaugurated the season of academic seminars for the 2026 academic year at IMPA Tech on Tuesday (24). A full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), Mr. Maculan inspired the young people on the Technology and Innovation Mathematics course by talking about his academic, professional and scientific experiences.
Born in Londrina (PR), Maculan has an engineering degree from the National School of Mines at the University of Ouro Preto (MG), a master’s degree in Mathematical Statistics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France, and a doctorate from the Production Engineering Program at Coppe/UFRJ, where he was director for a brief period in 1990.
The professor has made significant contributions to Brazilian education. In addition to his time as director of Coppe and rector of UFRJ between 1990 and 1994, Maculan was Secretary for Higher Education at the Ministry of Education from 2004 to 2006 and Secretary of State for Education in Rio de Janeiro from 2007 to 2008.
To a room full of curious and enthusiastic young people, the seminar covered his contributions to Computer Science in Brazil. He reviewed the mathematical optimization models for the Euclidean Steiner Tree Problem (ESTP) in d dimensions proposed in the literature, starting with a recent article.
“It’s an honor to be here with this whole group. I’ve had the pleasure of working with young people throughout my career. This presentation is a summary of 20 years of work, which was recently published in a European journal,” said Professor Maculan.
The ESTP is a non-linear optimization problem with mixed integer variables, whose history dates back to the 17th century. “Several properties of its optimal solutions are well known, but it is still a major challenge to encode these properties in its modeling, with a view to solving it numerically with branch-and-bound algorithms. We identified some of the difficulties and presented the modeling techniques used in the literature to overcome them,” said IMPA Tech professor Uéverton Souza, who organized the seminars.
“The problem presented is very interesting and easily understandable at any level. However, its solution is significantly more complex and involves a strong combinatorial basis, as well as some elements from Physics. The most important aspect was understanding the process of constructing the solution,” said student Lucas Vieira.
The weekly seminars bring together students and guest speakers from IMPA and partner institutions, promoting interdisciplinary debates and scientific exchange. “The idea is that we can connect the four undergraduate emphases – Mathematics, Physics, Data Science and Computer Science – and get an overview of what is being done in these areas,” Professor Uéverton explained to the freshmen.
“For the first seminar of this academic year, there was no one better to invite. Maculan is one of the most respected professors in computer science in Brazil. He’s one of the leading names in the field of linear optimization in the country, and it’s an honour to welcome him,” he added.
Six institutions have already awarded the title of doctor honoris causa (“because of honor” in Latin) to the former rector of UFRJ: the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI), the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), the Ricardo Palma University (Lima, Peru), the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), the Paris-XIII University (Paris, France) and the National Major University of San Marcos (Lima, Peru). The title is an honor awarded to people who stand out in their field and are respected by various sectors of society.
“Maculan’s career inspires me to continue seeking to deepen my knowledge, while contributing to its dissemination whenever possible,” said Vieira.
As well as taking part in the seminar, Professor Maculan visited IMPA Tech’s facilities and laboratories. He donated two books he co-authored to the institution’s library: “Topics in Integer Optimization” and “Numerical and Computational Linear Algebra”.
