The “Subject To” podcast is a series of conversations with experts in the areas of Operational Research, Combinatorial Optimization and Logistics, hosted by professor Anand Subramanian from the Federal University of Paraíba.

Check out the recent one where Jayme Szwarcfiter (PESC) gives a historical account of his personal and academic career, unmissable! Click here.

Contents of this video:
0:00 - Intro
1:40 - Polish background
4:43 - Family killed in the Holocaust
7:24 - Maracanazo in 1950
10:11 - Cidade Maravilhosa
10:52 - Witnessing the birth of Bossa Nova and musical interests 
13:29 - On deciding not going to university
14:12 - B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering at UFRJ
15:16 - "If you like mathematics you have to do engineering"
17:00 - Joining UFRJ as a lecturer, as well as Borroughs as system developer, both in 1968
19:54 - Masters project: library automation system
21:56 - Finding a position as PhD student at the Newcastle University in the UK
24:20 - PhD research work: generate objects from a certain collection
25:06 - Collaborating with Donald Knuth
29:06 - Post-doc at UC Berkeley with Eugene Lawler
30:56 - Collaborating with Christos Papadimitriou
34:57 - Witnessing the birth of the famous three-field notation used in scheduling
38:15 - Starting to supervise PhD students in the early 80s
39:08 - Post-doc at Cambridge with Béla Bollobás, also became friends with Reinhard Diestel
40:03 - On being a pioneer in the field in Brazil
41:22 - Post-doc in France
42:15 - Meeting Claude Berge
43:09 - Clique graphs + supervising Argentinian students
47:37 - Computational graph convexity 
50:13 - Research on scheduling and writing about OR topics in his textbooks
51:23 - Creating important international and national conferences
56:14 - Motivation to write textbooks in Portuguese
58:52 - Almirante Álvaro Alberto Prize: the highest recognition a researcher can receive in Brazil
1:00:35 - (No) secret for longevity
1:01:33 - Iconic hair/beard + relaxed personality 
1:02:40 - Concluding remarks

Published on 09/28/2023.