Homenagem ao colega P J Paes Leme

Transcrição: Nota sobre o PJ na NA-NET
NA Digest - Sunday, October 20, 1996 - Volume 96 : Issue 39
Receiving Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996

Last month the Computational and Applied Mathematics Brazilian community lost one of its leaders, PJ Paes-Leme. After a 12 year fight against a steady disease, PJ passed away on Sep 24, at the age of 48. During that struggle, he never stopped to make personal contributions to his country scientific achievements nor to carry out research in different areas of applications, having deepened colaborations with many groups from abroad.

A student of J.Glimm's in the 70's, at Courant Institute, PJ came back to his alma-mater, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-RJ, with the aim of establishing there a strong group in Applied Math. His efforts added to the other few local groups that were working towards the same goal and have helped to build nowadays flourishing of this area in Brazil.

His researches broad span of interests included Quantum Field Theory, Bio-Math, Pollution flows and, mainly, Oil Flow in Porous Media, where his main contributions have appeared. For more than one decade he has developed a strong collaboration with J.Douglas, Jr. and many of his coworkers, first in Chicago, then in Purdue, having looked closely to flows in fractured media, a subject suggested by a R&D project he has helped to carry out for Petrobras , the Brazilian state-owned oil company.

He was the President of SBMAC - Brazilian Society for Computational and Applied Math - from '85 to '87, but before and after that period he has always brought important contributions to the community, the most important of which was certainly his sharing of the chores of the Editorial Board of "Computational and Applied Mathematics", the Society main publication.

During the recent years his full strength was drawn to the Polytechnic Institute of Rio de Janeiro - IPRJ -, in Nova Friburgo, as its Chairman, having worked hardly to establish a interdisciplinary program in Computational Modeling.

He had always a very human insight towards people around himself - students, researchers, teachers, fellow workers no matter their background -, and he always passed along a lot of himself, of his experience, of his efforts. His former colleagues mourn him and are thankful for having met him.