Marília Chaves Peixoto

Marília Chaves Peixoto (24 February 1921 – 5 January 1961) and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

In an interview from 1952, she would describe her educational upbringing, stating that despite the high school in Santana do Livramento not accepting girls as students, the priests helped her enroll as a private student and take tests in the school.

She later moved to Rio de Janeiro, In 1949, Peixoto published "On the inequalities " in .

Following her work on convex functions, Peixoto was appointed an associate member of the Brazilian Academy of Science on 12 June 1951. She was the first Brazilian woman to join the organization, and the second woman after Marie Curie, a foreign associate of the academy. In 1949 they traveled to Chicago for the International Congress of Mathematicians of 1950. Despite being a participant in her own right, in the list of members she was listed as Maurício's spouse ("Mrs. Peixoto") rather than her full title.

In 1955, Peixoto published Cálculo vetorial (Vector calculus), a book aimed at students that is more focus on applications of vector calculus than proofs of results. one of several papers which led to Peixoto's theorem.

She died on 5 January 1961, aged 39.

She received a number of posthumous honors, 1955: Cálculo Vetorial: notas de aula. - book. 1959: Structural stability in the plane with enlarged boundary conditions. - paper.