Page 7 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 43

PREFACE
This volume is a collection of mathematical papers which are extended versions of some of the talks presented at the Special Session on Geometric Control The- ory - a tribute to F´atima Silva Leite on the occasion of her 60th anniversary, held during the 9th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control - CONTROLO’2010 (Coimbra, September 8-10, 2010). It also includes other papers by researchers who collaborated with F´atima and were invited to participate in this volume.
F´atima Silva Leite is a Full Professor in Mathematics at the University of Coim- bra. In March 2010 F´atima commemorated her 60th anniversary. She was born and grew up in Santo Tirso (a small town 25 quilometers north of Porto) and spent her undergraduate years at the University of Coimbra, where she graduated in Pure Mathematics in 1975. Ever since, she has been with the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra, starting as an Assistant Lecturer and making her way up to the top of the academic career. This is her “Home”, where she always returns after her scientific visits around the world. Indeed, in 1979 F´atima entered the University of Warwick in England as a gradu- ate student and returned in 1983 with a Ph.D. in Control Theory to be appointed Assistant Professor. Since then she started and maintained fruitful collaborations with many researchers around the world, spending every sabbatical leave in uni- versities abroad, working in the broad area of Mathematical Systems Theory, with particular emphasis on Geometric Nonlinear Control and Applications. The Arizona State University in USA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence (NICTA) in Canberra, the Technical University of Wroclaw in Poland, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, the University of New England in Armidale - Australia, the University of Wu¨rzburg in Germany, the University of Hawaii in USA, and the University of Bergen in Nor- way, are included in the vast list of visits abroad. Special emphasis goes to the seven periods, between 1986 and 1999, spent at the Arizona State University in USA, as a Faculty Associate and Visiting Professor at the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Further, she has also found ways to encourage Portuguese young up-and-coming scientists to open their minds and working with scientists abroad, and these seeds have been sowed due to her vast knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject.
It is true that these contacts have brought scientific benefits, but they also al- lowed her to create a lasting and working friendship with people from di↵erent parts of the globe, as we witnessed at CONTROLO’2010. Of course, the exchange of ideas and experiences worked in both ways and F´atima has always been very receptive to receiving and working with both established scientists and others in early stages of their careers (for instance, as a Ph.D. or Postdoc advisor).
Graduated in Pure Mathematics, we want to emphasize the remarkable e↵orts that F´atima has made (and still does!) to build bridges between mathematicians and