Brazilian Women in Mathematics

This is not the picture used in the blog about the Invited Talk, in which I look really bad.
This one is not great, but it's from the same day and I don't think it is too ugly. Besides, it has Jacqueline too, which is definitely a good thing!

Here I am just posting the write-up about the talk, written by the IMPA Communications journalist, Karine Rodrigues, which I liked very much (Thanks, Karine!). Ok, the write-up did make me ten years older than I am, but still, it gets (most of) the mathematics and why I like it, RIGHT and this is the main thing.

(Here's a Google translation of her text, adapted)

With the experience of those who built an enviable trajectory in more than three decades in research, with traffic in the academy and in Silicon Valley, the Brazilian Valeria de Paiva considers that the situation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is still "o fim da picada" (in colloquial Portuguese, "the pits").

Invited to give one of the special lectures of the Brazilian Meeting of Mathematical Women, held this weekend at IMPA, in Rio de Janeiro, the mathematician gave an interview to IMPA and talked about gender issues in science. Citing data from a survey conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Valeria notes that in the United States, the proportion of women employed in both areas fell between 1990 and 2013: from 35% to 26%. In Engineering, the movement was at least growth, but it was very shy, going from 9% to 12%.
"In the United States, at least, and I believe the statistics here in Brazil are not very different, the situation has worsened, if we consider, for example, Mathematics and Computation," emphasizes the researcher, who also began to devote herself to discussions. of gender in science in the last decade.

In the lecture that opened the programming of the second and last day of the event, “From Pure Algebra to Applied Category Theory: a personal journey”, Valeria spoke briefly about her trajectory between the Bachelor of Mathematics at PUC Rio in the early-1980s, and the current work at Samsung Research America where she helps create new products using Artificial Intelligence.

Before moving to Silicon Valley, she was a researcher at Cambridge University and Birmingham University in the United Kingdom. In Cambridge, having been supervised by Martin Hyland in her "Dialectica Categories" thesis, the researcher has as her academic great-grandfather none other than Alan Turing (1912-1954), considered the father of computing.

A specialist in Category Theory, an area that deals abstractly with mathematical structures and the relationships between them, Valeria explained, for example, how pure mathematics guides computation through the Curry-Howard Correspondence -- in programming language theory.
This is the direct relationship between computer programs and mathematical proofs, mediated by algebra/category theory.

"What I do is to use Category Theory, which is considered one of the purest areas of mathematics, in database computing applications, quantum computing, natural language semantics, and all of those things that seem very different from each other, but are actually deeply related," she joked. According to her, "this correspondence between such structures is a hidden gem of Mathematics, which relates logic to algebra and computing in a very surprising way."