Waldyr Alves Rodrigues Jr., professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing (Imecc), died last Monday (3), aged 71. He was born in Araraquara, in 1946. He graduated in Physics from USP, in 1968, and obtained a PhD from the University of Turin, also in Physics, in 1971. Full professor since 1986, he was one of the leaders of the physics-mathematics group from the Department of Applied Mathematics (DMA).
Among other administrative roles, he was director of Imecc from 1994-1998 and vice-president of the Foundation for the Development of Unicamp (Funcamp) from 1998-2000. He retired in 1998, but remained a collaborator at the DMA, maintaining scientific production, which yielded more than a hundred articles, in addition to his position as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras, which he held until 2015. He was the author of several books, including The Many Faces of Maxwell and Dirac and Einstein Equations: The Clifford Bundle Approach, in 2007.
Among the various works he headed, he led an ambitious project involving a team of experts and strategic partners - Steriwave Quantum Computing UK-Brazil and Unicamp, alongside Dario Sassi Thober (Wernher von Braun Advanced Research Center, Campinas) and Walter Carnielli (from the Center for Logic and Epistemology at Unicamp). The project included disciplines such as mathematics, physics, logic, process engineering and e-commerce, with a special focus on the areas of quantum logic and quantum cryptography and their commercial and industrial applications.
In 2012, he received the prestigious medal of honor from Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse), for his work on applications of Clifford algebras to Mathematical Physics. On September 11, 1999, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, published a list of the most cited physicists in the country. Waldyr Alves Rodrigues Jr. was among the most prominent in this list.
