By Gervasio Gurgel Bastos (Universidade Federal do Ceará)
Otto de Alencar Silva may be considered the rightful successor of
Joaquim Gomes de Sousa
for his scientific contribution and career at the Polytechnic School Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century.
He was Brazil’s first scholar and published articles in prestigious international journals in Portugal
(Jornal de Sciencias Mathematica e Astronomicas - Coimbra) and France (Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques – Paris).
Otto de Alencar also contributed to the education of mathematicians in the country and encouraged talented colleagues and students to study Mathematics.
His notable students include Manuel Amoroso Costa, Theodoro Ramos and Lélio Gama. The latter was a founding member and the
first diretor of IMPA (Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada).
Otto de Alencar Silva was born on August 3rd, 1874 , in Fortaleza, Ceará, and after completing his pre-college education in
Fortaleza, was sent by his parents to Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil. He was enrolled in the prestigious
“Escola Politécnica do Rio de Janeiro” and obtained his civil engineering degree at the age of 19. During that time he taught
himself higher Mathematics, potentially motivated by classes that he took in Mathematical Physics and Astronomy.
Following in the footsteps of Joaquim Gomes de Sousa, Brazil’s first mathematician, Alencar Silva devoted himself to the study
of Mathematical Analysis, Algebraic Functions and Lie Groups.
He created a stimulating mathematical environment at the “Escola Politécnica” and encouraged talented students and colleagues
to take up the subject. He also published several articles and lecture notes in the Journal of the Polytechnic School.
From 1895 to 1902 Alencar was a “Livre-Docente” (analogous to the German Privatdozent) at the Polytechnic School,
teaching Analytic Geometry, Calculus, Rational Mechanics and Topography. In 1907 he became an Effective Substitute Professor. He died in 1912.
In a conference in 1918, the mathematician Manuel Amoroso Costa – the main spreader of the Theory of Relativity in
Brazil – said that “as a teacher, Otto de Alencar has the invaluable gift of enticing the curiosity of his disciples.
(…) His teaching was praiseworthy for its content and form and led to a complete renewal of our mathematical studies.
One would have a hard time counting all the ideas and books that he introduced to us…”.
Otto also espoused a revolutionary view of Science that clashed with the exacerbated Positivism of A. Comte, then prevalent amongst
Brazilian intellectuals. His 1898 paper Alguns Erros de Mathematica na Synthese Subjectiva de A. Comte (“Some mathematical errors in A.
Comte’s Subjective Synthesis”) was an early milestone in the ultimate rejection of Positivism by Brazil’s nascent scientific community.
A sample of Alencar’s mathematical contributions can be found in the book of collected works of SILVA & BASTOS: "Otto de Alencar Silva –
uma coletânea de estudos e cartas", Ed. UFC, Fortaleza (2006).
Some titles from that book hint at his areas of interest:
1) Higher Algebra: theory of symmetric functions, elliptic functions and Riemmann surfaces;
2) Differential Geometry: Geometric Applications of the Riccati equation, and Some Questions about the Theory of Covariants and Double Curvature Curves;
3) Mathematical Phisics: On the Action of Acceleration Forces on the Propagation of Sound, and On the Use of the Function d(logG(n)) / dn in a problem from Electrostatics.
