Luiz Suzana

Education

To be brief, I can say that I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Mathematics & Scientific Computing from the Federal University of Santa Catarina. But let me add some color to it.

First, when did I realize that I liked math? Well, it all started in elementary school, with good grades in mathematics, patient teachers, and great encouragement from my parents.

After that, and motivated by my good performance in the subject, I got a bronze medal in Brazilian Maths Olympiad for Public Schools (OBMEP) in 2010, which gave me a scholarship and allowed me a different approach to learn and study math, including self-learning. In monthly meetings with other medalist students and supervised by an instructor, I started to tackle more challenging math problems than those I was used to, which forced me to search for more content and learn new techniques by myself.

Eventually, I was learning math both from school and from my own naive research. I got two more medals: gold in 2012, when I was in the 8th grade, and silver in 2015, when I was in the last year of high school. Such achievements, combined with encouragement from teachers, led me to choose the bachelor's program in mathematics for my undergraduate studies.

In the first two years in college, besides the regular math courses, I also completed the Mathematics Advanced Program (PAM), by which the regular courses in calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations get replaced with advanced ones. During the last two years of my undergraduate studies, which took place from 2016 to 2019, I studied and wrote my dissertation about differential geometry in manifolds.

By that time, I didn’t even know how to write my “Hello world!” piece of code. So when did I begin to think about applied mathematics? Well, at some point during my undergraduate program, I began to feel the need to apply my mathematical expertise to practical situations and to solve concrete problems in the real world. This desire inspired me to take a master's program in order to learn about new domains, this time in applied mathematics.

More specifically, from March 2020 to March 2022, I completed my master's program in Convex Optimization, which led me to meet Andrea (who used to be my classmate in remote classes during the pandemic of COVID 19 and now is my co-worker) and Aster Santana. As a matter of fact, we are academic siblings because the three of us had the same master’s advisor, Maicon Marques Alves. Through Aster, I got exposed for the first time to how optimization problems arise in practical settings, and I quickly got interested and curious to know how to model and solve them.

And that’s where I am right now: solving real-world problems at Mip Wise. It’s fascinating to see how a combination of well-written code and mathematical optimization can improve decisions around the world leading to, for example, better resource utilization in healthcare, such as with staff scheduling and organ donation matching; improving the public transportation system of a city, by prescribing better routes and better schedules; and reducing the delivery time of products we buy at an online store.