Page 153 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 34

HOW I MET JORGE ANTO´NIO SAMPAIO MARTINS 143
As was the case in many schools of higher education in Portugal, the lack of teaching staff was much in evidence there as well. Many were the hours one had to put in, and during the school year there was hardly any time left over for the Teaching Assistants to engage in research. Often, in addition to teaching practical classes, they were charged with the teaching of theoretical classes as well, although always under the guidance of a full professor. I remember that in 1970/71 Sampaio Martins was in charge of a class in General Mathematics for Engineering and in the following year a class in Mathematical Analysis II and another one in Introduction to Differential Geometry, with myself as supervisor. He always dispatched his duties with the greatest of proficiency and did so even when the circumstance arouse during the school year of 1971/72 that one of my own sons became a student in the first year of Engineering, which necessitated that I abstain from the elaboration of written exams in Mathematical Analysis, putting the extra burden of this responsibility on Sampaio Martins.
The time available for personal study was not great, as I have said above, but the dedication was immense. Arriving at the Lourenc¸o Marques University in November of 1970, I was able, in the second semester of the school year which had by then begun, to combine my teaching duties with the running of a seminar in Functional Analysis in which, every Wednesday, I occupied myself with the limits of the Cauchy-Kowalewski theory on equations with partial derivations and the contribution which functional analysis was making to the study of these equations. Sampaio Martins was, naturally, auditing the seminar, and I prepared the following research program for him:
1. Deepen the knowledge of Algebra (especially Linear Algebra), Real Analysis and General Topology.
2. General study of Banach and Hilbert spaces.
3. Special study of the functional spaces which are important for applications,
namely Lp spaces and Sobolev spaces.
4. Various applications of functional analysis (especially through the study of orig-
inal memories).
The University conceded grants for studying abroad and in my dossiers of the
period it is registered that his candidacy was approved at the Senate session which took place on the 22nd of December 1971. The program of studies was the above. The fact that he had graduated from Coimbra in 1965 with a grade average of 16 was also indicated, along with the fact that he had been an assistant professor for five years and two months, but with research time reduced, as, of these years, four of them coincided with his military service. Among the 17 candidates, Sampaio Martins figured among the six finalists. I started to prepare a letter to an English university inquiring into the possibility of Sampaio Martins being received there to work during the 1972/73 school year, but the letter was never sent because, in the