Date: 11th April
Hour: 5.15 p.m.
Venue: Congress Centre, Alameda Campus, Civil Engineering Building (Floor -1)
Participate: Registration (free of charge and mandatory)
Get to know the master’s programmes offered by the Department of Mathematics at Técnico, the professors, the students and all the opportunities that open up when you come to study at Técnico.
Programme:
5.15 p.m. | Opening of doors
5.30 p.m. | Lecture: Prof. Patrícia Gonçalves (30min + 30min for questions)
6.30 p.m.| Get to know the master’s programmes with students, professors and opportunities (student support, scholarships, internationalisation)
7.30 p.m. | End of event
Lecture:
The connection between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds: the deduction of universal laws from the (random) movement of particles.
In this lecture we will understand how to obtain universal patterns that model the evolution of macroscopic quantities in physical systems, from the analysis of microscopic models made up of the constituent particles of these systems, such as analysing the evolution of the density of a gas through the movement of its molecules. We will assume that this movement is random (i.e. that the molecules move in a certain direction with a certain probability) and, based on this hypothesis, we will deduce laws for the evolution of density. These laws are universal and are present in many physical systems.
Patrícia Gonçalves was born in Esposende and grew up in the city of Barcelos. She finished her degree in Mathematics (educational and pure branches) at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto in 2002 and in 2003 began a PhD in Mathematics at IMPA – Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which she completed in 2007. Shortly afterwards, she did a post-doctorate at the University of São Paulo and another at the University of Minho. She worked as a researcher at the University of Minho, FCT Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro until 2016, when she joined the Instituto Superior Técnico as an associate professor, at the Department of Mathematics.
She has won several research grants from various funding agencies, in particular the “Estímulo à investigação” grant in 2008 funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as other research grants funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. She is an associate editor of several important international scientific journals in the field of probability. She gave a lecture in the probability session at the 2022 International Mathematical Congress, which is held every four years. She has published around 70 scientific articles in the field of mathematics, has given more than 100 talks at international scientific events and has been a member of various organising committees for important events in the field of probability.
In 2016, she was awarded a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to carry out research into “hydrodynamic limits and equilibrium fluctuations: the universality of particle systems”, worth approximately one million two hundred thousand euros, and to date, the only grant awarded in the field of mathematics in Portugal. This grant made it possible to study the universal laws that are present (but hidden) in various physical systems in the world around us.
She was vice-president of the Portuguese Mathematical Society – SPM – in 2020/2021. In 2023, she was named a “corresponding member” of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and was named the “Schramm lecture” at the most important event in the field of probability: the “Stochastic Processes and their Applications” congress, which will take place in 2024 in Bochum, Germany. She is currently a full professor at the IST Department of Mathematics; since 2017 she has been a member of IST’s Scientific Council; and since 2021 she has been President of IST-ID’s Scientific Council.
Master’s Programmes offered by the Department of Mathematics:
Master’s Programme in Applied Mathematics and Computation
Master’s Programme in Data Science and Engineering
Master’s Programme in Information Security and Cyberspace Law (in partnership with the Faculty of Law at Universidade de Lisboa and the Portuguese Naval School)
About Técnico MasterTalks:
Técnico offers 33 master’s programmes ranging from Engineering to Architecture, Aerospace Engineering to Bioengineering, Engineering Physics to Civil Engineering, Electronics Engineering to Chemistry, Natural Resources to Computer Science, Management to Nuclear Technologies, including Mathematics.
Every month, we invite you to come and meet the professors, and to learn more about the student projects and all the opportunities that are available to those who study at Técnico. The MasterTalks take place on a Thursday, at 5.15 p.m., in Técnico Congress Centre, Lisbon.
