Page 34 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 44

24 A. KOVACˇEC
secret police and detained. His weakened heart does not support this for long and Cara¸ca dies in June 25, 1948. The funeral ceremonies, though controlled by the regime, are attended by thousands.
What concerns Ruy Lu´ıs Gomes, we learn from Nat´alia that he was born in December 5, 1905 as son to a later President (Rector) of the University of Coimbra, a professor of law. From his twenties onwards he corresponded with figures like Tullio Levi Civita, Luis de Broglie, John von Neumann about the theory of relativity and Quantum mechanics, achieving simplified deductions that were taken note of by these eminent men. Influenced by his friend the renowned Professor of Medicine Abel Salazar, Ruy Lu´ıs got interested enough in the philosophy of the Viennese Circle as to give at the University of Porto’s centenary in 1937 a talk with the title ‘Neopositive Analysis of Space and Time’. Ruy Lu´ıs Gomes expressed admiration of Bento de Jesus Cara¸ca and the latter would have agreed to the former’s opinion that ‘the resurgence of the study of mathematics in Portugal will be possible only in the measure that the immense intellectual energy of our youths will be mobilized’.
Apart of books on mathematical physics, Ruy Lu´ıs Gomes has written on integration. Jean Dieudonn´e, a well known opponent of teaching the Riemann integral in detriment of the Lebesgue integral, in 1952 in the Mathematical Re- views made the following comment on a book of Gomes’: ‘This is a clear and well written textbook on Jordan measure and Riemann integral in n-dimensional Euclidean space’. In 1958, the opposer of the regime (which in 1951 had run for Presidency) was forced to leave Portugal and assumed a professorship in Bahia Blanca, Argentina. When Dieudonn´e later visited that university, he was greeted with a poster: ‘Dr. Dieudonn´e in this institute nobody ever taught the Riemann integral!’
At about the same time Nat´alia coordinated the edition and contributed the text to a photobiography of Ruy Lu´ıs Gomes, a luxurious, lavishly designed and heavy book printed on high quality paper.
A widely read book of Natalia’s was published in 2000. Its translated title is ‘Mathematics or tables, chairs, and beer mugs’, influenced certainly by the famous dictum of Hilbert concerning the axioms of geometry. In that book Nat´alia tries to spread mathematical literacy in an entertaining way among the public. After general sections called ‘Mathematics’, ‘What is mathematics?’, ‘Mathematics and Beauty’, ‘The utilitarian Conception’, and ‘To the Reader’, the lay - and not so lay - man is offered a panorama of many aspects of the mathematical endeavour.
The books’ thirteen chapters are titled ‘Fermat’s last theorem’, ‘Mathe- matic’s earliest times’, ‘Euclides Elements’, ‘The Infinite’, ‘Circle Squaring’,