Another tribute in celebration of the 80th birthday of our dear Nelson Maculan Filho - Professor Emeritus at COPPE and the Institute of Mathematics at UFRJ and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences since 1997 - took place on Monday, August 7, 2023, organized by the Professors Manoel Bezerra Campelo Neto (Full Professor at the Federal University of Ceará and coordinator of the Special Commission on Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization of the Brazilian Computing Society), Lucidio dos Anjos Formiga Cabral (Full Professor and current Director of the Informatics Center at the Federal University of Paraíba) and Laura Silvia Bahiense da Silva Leite (Associate Professor and recently elected Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Systems and Computing Engineering at COPPE/UFRJ).

The tribute was also attended by professors Jayme Luiz Szwarcfiter (Professor Emeritus at COPPE and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences since 2011) and Cláudio Leonardo Lucchesi (Professor Emeritus at UNICAMP).

The event took place during a special session of the VIII Meeting of Theory of Computing, an event of the Congress of the Brazilian Computing Society, which took place from August 7 to 11, 2023 and brought together more than a thousand people at the Convention Center in the city of João Pessoa, in Paraiba.

In the tribute, Professor Manoel Campelo highlighted Professor Nelson Maculan's research, the most relevant topics on which he worked, in addition to his participation in scientific societies and the awards he received throughout his career.

Professor Lucidio Cabral highlighted the importance of Professor Maculan's Master's and Doctorate orientations in the training of teachers, mainly Brazilians, especially those from the Northeast Region of Brazil.

Professor Laura Bahiense praised the importance of Professor Maculan with regard to academic management, in particular his passage through the Secretariat of Higher Education (SESu) of the Ministry of Education, between 2004 and 2006, when he led the design and implementation of several programs that guaranteed the democratization and internalization of higher education in our country. Programs such as REUNI, the creation of new universities and federal teaching institutes, the quota system and PROUNI, which ensured the expansion of higher education that we have today.

Finally, professors Jayme Szwarcfiter and Cláudio Lucchesi shared amusing passages they shared with Professor Maculan throughout their careers.

Published on 08/16/2023.