The Portuguese connection of José Gallego-Díaz

Resumo

This essay is dedicated to the life and scientific endeavour of José Gallego-Díaz, a Spanish mathematician and engineer whose career was deve- loped between the early 1930s and 1965 in three different political and social environments: The Spanish Republic and the civil war; then Franco’s dic- tatorial regime from 1939 until 1956; and finally in the Americas. Although a leftist politically involved in the first two stages, regardless of political regimes he was able to produce a body of mathematical ideas and applicati- ons which was a breakthrough in the Spanish mathematical panorama, not too prone to applied Mathematics in those times. In the pre-civil war years Gallego-Díaz contributed to Mathematical Biology when this discipline was in its infancy, and after the war he contributed some original studies in the mathematisation of certain fields of economic theory, whose results were published in the Portuguese journals Revista de Economía, and Gazeta de Matemática, of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Matemática. He was an uncommon teacher who enjoyed problem proposal and elegant solutions, and in addition he often wrote on very different fields, leaving behind him an abundant collection of notes, reviews, recensions, and other materials of non-mathematical nature.