Maurício Matos Peixoto

Maurício Matos Peixoto (April 15, 1921 – April 28, 2019) was a Brazilian engineer and mathematician. He pioneered the studies on structural stability, and was the author of Peixoto's theorem.

Biography

Maurício Peixoto, born in Fortaleza in 1921 to José Carlos de Matos Peixoto and Violeta Rodrigues Peixoto, pursued a career in mathematics since his adolescence. To fulfill his goal, Peixoto enrolled in engineering at the School of Engineering of the current Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

While still working at the School of Engineering around 1955, Peixoto came into contact with the work of De Baggis, a student of Solomon Lefschetz. Through this work, he learnt about the problem of structural stability of dynamic systems. After some correspondence with Solomon Lefschetz regarding this problem, Peixoto was invited and went to Princeton University in 1957 to work as Lefschetz's student on the topic of structural stability of differential equations.

Once, while talking with Lefschetz, Peixoto commented that no one cared about structural stability of dynamical systems and that was the main problem in working with it. But to Peixoto's surprise Lefschetz's answer was no less than "No Mauricio, this is no trouble, this is your luck. Try to work as hard and as fast as you can on this subject because the day will come when you will not understand a single word of what they will be saying about structural stability; this happened to me in topology."

In 1986, Peixoto was awarded the TWAS Prize by the Third World Science Academy, "for his fundamental and pioneer studies on structural stability in dynamical systems, in particular for proving that surface flows are generically structurally stable."

Personal life Peixoto married engineer and mathematician Marília Magalhães Chaves (who was known professionally by her married name) Marília Chaves Peixoto in 1946, with whom he had two children. The couple collaborated in their work, jointly published "Structural Stability in the plane with enlarged boundary conditions" in 1959, before Marília Chaves Peixoto's early death in 1961. It would be a key paper which led to the development of Peixoto's theorem.