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U.Porto Memory

University of Porto Famous Alumni

Tiago de Oliveira

Tiago de Oliveira 1928-1992 Mathematician, statistician and teacher

Tiago de Oliveira was born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, on 22 December 1928. Both his parents, from the Douro region, upheld the republican ideals.
In Africa, where he lived his childhood and teenage years, he proved to have great intellectual abilities. He read a lot, in particular works by Bertrand Russel, and was interested in languages. In addition to English, he mastered Landim (a dialect of Mozambique), knew French and taught himself Classical Greek. Eugénio Lisboa, his long-time friend, once said he was an intelligent young man, full of energy and a compulsive reader of Science and Philosophy books.

In 1945, he received a scholarship sponsored by Caixa Económica Postal, which enabled him to pursue his education in Portugal. He then travelled to Porto where he wanted to study Naval Engineering. However, he soon changed his plans when he discovered his true vocation in a Statistics book he bought in a stopover in Lobito, shortly before coming to Mainland Portugal.

In Porto, he enrolled in the Mathematics course at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, which he finished in 1949 with the final mark of eighteen out of twenty. One year later, he completed a degree in Geographical Engineering at the same university.
During his degree, besides studying he was also involved in other activities, for example, he became a member of the MUDJ Party (Democratic Youth Unity Movement), participated in the Queima das Fitas festivities, and in social events.

His political activism for democracy was an obstacle to the start of his professional career. Despite his excellent qualifications, he was prevented from being appointed Professor at the University of Porto in two competitions in which he had come first.

He left Porto and moved to Lisbon in 1951 to work at the Institute of Maritime Biology (1951-1953). In that same year he married Ermelinda de Oliveira Brandão, who came from a family who opposed the regime, and they had three children. He was invited by Professor António Almeida Costa to teach, as 2nd Assistant, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

After many works on Statistics, a theme he would return to in 1962, he published books on Algebra along with Professor António Almeida Costa, a theme which both researchers loved.
After defending his PhD thesis entitled "Residuais de Sistemas e Radicais de Anéis" [Residuals of Systems and Radicals of Rings], at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, he worked from 1957 to 1965 as 1st Assistant of the University of Lisbon. In 1963, he sat his Aggregation exams presenting the dissertation "Estatística de Densidades; Resultados Assintóticos" [Statistics of Densities; Asymptotic Results]. In the academic year 1967/1968, he was appointed Full Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the same Faculty.

In 1971, he took his sabbatical year to become involved in the reform of education at the request of the Ministry of Education, José Veiga Simão, and gave conferences in Angola, Israel, Greece and the USA.

In the 1970s, he joined the Portuguese Freemasonry and the Socialist Party; later, he was part of the governments in 1977/1978, and 1988/1989.
After his political involvement, he became dedicated exclusively to the University; he even chaired the Group of Applied Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences. In 1988, he transferred to the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he founded the Laboratory of Statistics and Actuarial Mathematics.

This remarkable scientist and teacher died on 23 June 1992, victim of heart problems.
(Universidade Digital / Gestão de Informação, 2008)