Marília Chaves Peixoto


Marília Chaves Peixoto was a Brazilian mathematician and engineer who worked in dynamical systems. Peixoto was the first Brazilian woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Career

Peixoto graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1943 with a degree in engineering, having also studied mathematics at the university and acted as a monitor for the university's National Faculty of Philosophy. In 1948, she received a doctorate in mathematics, and began teaching at the Escola Politécnica da UFRJ. In 1949, Peixoto published "On the inequalities " in. Following her work on convex functions, Peixoto was appointed an associate member of the Brazilian Academy of Science on 12 June 1951. She was the first Brazilian woman to join the organization, and the second woman after Marie Curie, a foreign associate of the academy.
Peixoto married Maurício Peixoto in 1946. The pair jointly published "Structural Stability in the plane with enlarged boundary conditions" in 1959, one of several papers which led to Peixoto's theorem.

Personal life

Peixoto had two children, Marta and Ricardo, with Maurício Peixoto.