Subject to: Yoshiko Wakabayashi

Описание: Yoshiko Wakabayashi is a retired professor at Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil. She holds a degree in Mathematics Education and a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from USP, as well as a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Augsburg. Her research interests include combinatorial optimization, graph theory, algorithms, packing problems, and polyhedral combinatorics. She has published more than 50 papers in journals such as Mathematical Programming, Theoretical Computer Science, Journal of Combinatorial Theory: Series B, Discrete Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Computers & Operations Research, and Discrete Applied Mathematics. Yoshiko supervised 16 doctoral and 20 master’s students, as well as 7 postdocs. In 2010, she was named a commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit. She was later elected to the Academy of Sciences of the State of São Paulo in 2012 and to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2019. In 2020, she was awarded the prize for scientific merit by the Brazilian Computer Society.

Contents of this video:
0:00 - Intro
1:21 - Pronunciation of Yoshiko Wakabaywashi
2:23 - Mandatory retirement
3:00 - Family background
6:27 - Speaking Japanese in childhood
7:50 - Having access to good public education in the city of Lavínia
8:55 - Discovering table tennis
14:40 - Interest in biographical books about classical composers
16:37 - Moving to Araçatuba at the age of 15
18:33 - Motivation to study Mathematics at USP in 1968
19:53 - When the military invaded USP dorms
25:24 - Very fruitful one-year exchange period in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1968-69
32:07 - Receiving the news that her parents went bankrupt in 1969 + working as private teacher
38:35 - Attending free programming classes at IBM
39:40 - Finding a job as a part-time school teacher in a public school to continue with her studies at USP after graduating
43:05 - Handwriting an assembly program
45:31 - Attending a graph theory course that changed her life
47:57 - Quitting her job to focus on her graduate studies
51:53 - Almost missing qualifying exams while caring for her father after a stroke
54:39 - Master's thesis on Hamiltonian graphs (written by hand!)
58:20 - Meeting s.t. guest Martin Grötschel at USP
1:01:54 - Prof Murty's influence on her JCTB paper "On k-leaf-connected graphs"
1:04:46 - PhD in Germany 1982 under the supervision of s.t. guest Martin Grötschel
1:13:04 - Challenges to run computational experiments during the PhD
1:16:29 - Meeting distinguished figures in combinatorial optimization
1:18:19 - A 12-Minute PhD Defense in German in 1986
1:19:32 - Main contributions of the PhD
1:21:41 - Turning attention to approximation algorithms
1:25:05 - Favorite contributions in graph theory
1:29:23 - Organizing two highly relevant schools in 1990 and 2016
1:35:18 - Coordinating a South American research project involving 50 researchers
1:36:35 - On receiving several important prizes
1:37:28 - Gender issues
1:40:12 - Secret to staying fit all these years: Tai Chi
1:41:31 - Plans for the future
1:42:34 - Takeaway message
1:45:00 - Concluding remarks