Page 157 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 34

PRAISE AND SIMPLIFICATION OF J. A. SAMPAIO MARTINS∗ F. J. CRAVEIRO DE CARVALHO
The first words that occurred to me as I thought about this text are not my own:
“I was twenty, I won’t stand for anyone who says it is the best time of our lives.”
(“Aden Arabie” , Paul Nizan).
Just as it was for the generations immediately preceding my own, it was not easy
to be twenty years old when I was growing up. These were times which influenced some of the best Portuguese poetry of the period. Pedro Homem de Mello spoke of how “A bloody dust / Covers the Portuguese soil” (“H´a uma rosa na manh˜a agreste”). Gast˜ao Cruz, to give another example, alludes to “the sky blanketing weapons” (“As Aves”). And, Sophia, in her precise way, would call it a “Time of negation . . . Time of threat” (“Livro Sexto”).
It was around this time that I met the man who brings us together here today. A bit older than I was, he had about him, to cite Gast˜ao Cruz once again, “the ricochet // of bullets in flight / drilling through our ears / deeply and dryly”. He had just arrived from Mozambique, where he had been living for several years. For two years, we would share the office in the Department of Mathematics which, to this day, I still occupy.
What I remember of these two first years is, above all, two kids scribbling in color on a blackboard, which at the time existed there, who were a bit frightened when I showed up. For one of them, some years later during a period of extreme personal suffering, I would bear an enormous debt of gratitude.
For reasons which are not at the moment pertinent, having to do mostly with the academic belatedness common then, and which some were already trying to amend, we both left on the 25th of September 1974 for England to prepare our doctorates.
The TAP Boeing 727 circled irritatingly above Heathrow before landing. In- tellectually armed with our cardboard suitcases, we said goodbye to each other at Victoria Station.
For the period, Professor Sampaio Martins achieved the notable accomplishment of finishing his doctorate in Pure Mathematics in three years. He studied with the great British mathematician, David Edmunds, here with us today. I took another year, but I would return in time to teach a class which was attended by some brilliant students, many of whom would come to be lecturers here in the department. We
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