Academic Path

By Abel Soares Siqueira

TL;DR:

  • 11/2014-present - Professor at UFPR;
  • 12/2013-11/2014 - Postdoctorate at UNICAMP, improving the work of my doctorate;
  • 01/2009-11/2013 - Doctorate at UNICAMP on the field of Applied Mathematics, working
with Nonlinear Optimization. My thesis was "Dynamic Control of Infeasibility
for Nonlinear Programming"
  • 03/2005-12/2008 - Bachelor of Applied Mathematics;

Long version:

I began working on mathematics on 2005, entering the course 51 of UNICAMP, where you study for one and half year the common classes to Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Physics, and some other courses. Initially I planned to follow Pure Mathematics, but after my first programming class, I considerer changing to some area of Computations. The following semester I studied Numerical Calculus, which led me to the path of Applied Mathematics. This felling was reforced by Numerical Analysis and Nonlinear Programming, and I soon decided to follow the academic path.

In 2007, I started a Scientific Initiation with my advisor and good friend Francisco de Assis Magalhães Gomes Neto, entitled “Interior Point Methods for Quadratic Programming”. My reason for choosing Chico, as he is commonly known, was that he was from the Nonlinear Optimization area and had previously worked with C++, which I intended to learn. The work was completed by 2008.

In 2008, having interest in the academic path, I decided to “rush” some teaching of the post-graduate level. I rushed two in the first semester, and one in the second. The teaching rushed were “Matrices”, which is a discipline about theoretical properties of matrices, norms, eigenvalues, linear systems, and decompositions, with some algorithmic considerations, but no programming. The other was “Numerical Methods for Linear Algebra”, which is basically the programming part of “Matrices”. This was my first contact with FORTRAN, which was awful. The last discipline was “Topics of Numerical Analysis”, which in this case was about finite differences. I finished my graduation on december of this year.

In 2009, I started my Doctorate on Applied Mathematics, also on UNICAMP, in the work “Dynamic Control of Infeasibility for Nonlinear Programming”. During the doctorate, I studied Linear Programming, Nonlinear Optimization and Derivative-Free Optimization. On December, 2013, I finished my doctorate.

On December, 2013, I started my post-doctorate, following the work of my doctorate. On March, 2014, I participated on the selection process to work on UFPR, and was approved at third position. I was called to work on November, 2014;