The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded a Rubicon grant to Fernando de Oliveira Filho. He receives the grant for his research project ‘Optimization methods for extremal geometry’. The Rubicon program aims to encourage talented young researchers and offers them to gain experience at a top research institute outside the Netherlands. Oliveira is going to do his research at the Institute of Mathematics at the Technical University Berlin.

Oliveira received in 2009 his PhD at the University of Amsterdam for his thesis 'New Bounds for Geometric Packing and Coloring via Harmonic Analysis and Optimization', based on four years of research at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). In his thesis he found improved upper bounds for the chromatic number of Euclidean spaces. His current research builds on this and investigates how optimization methods can be extended to deal with problems in other branches of mathematics, namely geometry and combinatorics.

The research will be developed at the Institute of Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin, namely in the Discrete Geometry group under the leadership of Günter M. Ziegler. The group is internationally recognized as one of the leading groups in discrete geometry and combinatorics.

Currently Oliveira is holding a post doc position at Tilburg University in the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research, where he is collaborating in the research project of Etienne de Klerk, supported by his Vidi grant. For two days a week Oliveira pursues his research activities at CWI, until the end of January 2011.

Illustration: Fernando de Oliveira Filho