Jorge Manuel Sotomayor Tello

Jorge Manuel Sotomayor Tello (25 March 1942 – 7 January 2022) was a Peruvian-born Brazilian mathematician who worked on differential equations, bifurcation theory, and differential equations of classical geometry.

He is one of five sons of Alfonso Sotomayor Ibarra, an accountant, and Clara Rosa Tello de Sotomayor. He was married to Marilda Antonia de Oliveira Sotomayor and had two children.

Sotomayor earned his Ph.D. from the IMPA in 1964 under the supervision of Maurício Peixoto at the age of 22.

In the dissertation Estabilidade Estrutural de Primeira Ordem e Variedades de Banach ("First order structural stability and Banach manifolds") he presented a geometric reinterpretation and extension of the fruitful notions and results relating bifurcations and stability that were introduced by A. A. Andronov and E. A. Leontovich.

Sotomayor visited the University of California at Berkeley during 1966–1968.

He was a recipient of Brazil's National Order of Scientific Merit in mathematics. From 1994 until his death in early 2022, he was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications

"with C. Gutiérrez: Structurally Stable Configurations of Lines of Principal Curvature", Astérisque, França, v. 98--99, p. 195--215, (1982).