Jorge Nuno Silva

Jorge Nuno Silva (born 1956) is a Portuguese mathematician who taught at the University of Lisbon, starting in 1995 and retiring in 2023.[1] His interests encompass the pedagogy of mathematics, history of mathematics, history of board games, mathematical games, and recreational mathematics. He is the chief editor for Recreational Mathematics Magazine[2] and Board Game Studies Journal.[3]

Education

In 1974, Silva completed his secondary education at the National Lyceum of Viana do Castelo. Subsequently, in 1976/77, he enrolled at the University of Lisbon School of Medicine. In 1983, he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Pure Mathematics from the University of Lisbon Faculty of Sciences (FCUL).[4] In 1991 he obtained a Master of Arts degree at UC Berkeley, writing Some Notes on Game Bounds under the direction of Elwyn Berlekamp.[5] In 1994 he got a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley with the dissertation, "Some Notes on the Theory of Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions on the Unit Disc" under doctoral advisor Donald Erik Sarason.[6]

Teaching

From 1995 until his retirement in April 2023 he was a professor at the University of Lisbon.[4] First at the Department of Mathematics (1995-2006), and then at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (2006-2023).

He is a teacher trainer for Associação Ludus and the Portuguese Mathematical Society.

Mathematics promotion

In 1998 Silva wrote Berkley Problems of Mathematics, a compendium of problems which is widely used by PhD candidates as a reference.[7] He is president of the Ludus Association (Associação Ludus), an organization for popularizing the culture and history of mathematics.[8] He is a member of Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT)

Silva has been involved in efforts to popularize mathematics around the world. In a 2009 interview he stated his guiding philosophy: "Mathematics is, by its very nature, the pure joy of thinking, and the same goes for board games. There is a lack of challenging activities in our Western culture. Games can close this gap; there are many interrelationships between mathematics, history, and culture."[9] In an interview with Diário de Notícias he said, "One day a great game will be invented to teach Mathematics and the world will change."[10]

Silva is the co-founder of the Circo Matemático which, since its founding in 2011, has toured more than a dozen countries on four continents promoting the popularization of mathematics.[11]

In Portugal he has had an enormous effect on mathematics in public education[12] and he often appears on Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) as an expert on games.[13][14]

Books

  • 1998: Berkeley Problems in Mathematics (with Paulo Ney de Souza), Springer (1998), ISBN 0387204296
  • 1998: Some Notes on Game Bounds, Dissertation.com (1998), ISBN 1581120214[15]
  • 1998: Some Notes on the Theory of Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions of the Unit Disc, Dissertation.com (1998), ISBN 1581120230[15]
  • 2013: Mathematical Games, Abstract Games (with Joao Neto), Dover Puzzle Books (19201398), ISBN 0486499901
  • 2013: O Livro de Jogos de Afonso X, o Sábio, Apenas 2013, ISBN 978-989-618-421-6
  • 2017: Proceedings of the Board Game Studies Colloquium (2017), ISBN 1977599338[15]
  • 2022: As Loterias Lisbonenses (1834) de Francisco António Marques Giraldes Barba, 2a edição, Ludus 2022, ISBN 979-883-7880902
  • 2022: Tratado da Prática de Aritmética (1519) de Gaspar Nicolas. FCG 2022 (with Pedro Freitas), ISBN 978-972-31-1646-5

Papers

  • "Konane has infinite nim-dimension" (with Carlos Pereira dos Santos) Integers: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory, January 2008[12]
  • "On Mathematical Games", The British Journal for the History of Mathematics: Bulletin 26 (2), (2011)
  • "Composition Operators on a Local Dirichlet Space", (with D Sarason), J. Ana. Math. 87, 433-450
  • Breakfast with John Horton Conway, Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society 57, September 2005, pp. 32–34.
  • Mathematical games in Europe around the year 1000, Gerbertus, Vol I, 2010, pp. 205–217
  • Martin Gardner (1914-2010), Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society 79, March 2011, pp. 21–23
  • Mathematics of Soccer, Recreational Mathematics Magazine 1, 2014 (with Alda Carvalho and Carlos Santos) http://rmm.ludus-opuscula.org/Home/ArticleDetails/92
  • A very mathematical card trick, Recreational Mathematics Magazine 2, September 2014, pp. 41–52 (with Carlos Santos and Pedro Duarte)
  • Nimbers in Partizan Games, Games of No Chance 4, R.J. Nowakowski (Ed.), MSRI Publications Series, Vol 63, 215–223, 2015 (with Carlos Santos)
  • Allégorie de la Géométrie. A Mathematical Interpretation, Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Volume 3, Issue 5, Pages 33–45, ISSN (Online) 2182-1976, DOI: 10.1515/rmm-2016-0003, April 2016 (with Alda Carvalho and Carlos Pereira dos Santos)
  • Measuring Drama in Goose-like Games, Board Game Studies Journal. Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 101–119, ISSN (Online) 2183-3311, DOI: 10.1515/bgs-2016-0005, September 2016 (with João Pedro Neto)
  • The geometer dog who did not know calculus, in The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 48(5), November 2017 (with Alda Carvalho and Carlos Pereira dos Santos)
  • Measuring Drama in Snakes & Ladders, in Game & Puzzle Design, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017, pp. 56–63. (with João Pedro Neto)
  • Foundations of Digital Archæoludology, 31 May 2019 (with Cameron Browne et al.) http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13516
  • Mathematical Treasure: Gaspar Nicolas’s Tratado da Prática D’arismetyca, Convergence, MAA, July 2021
  • Playing Symmetries. Portuguese Sidewalks, in Symmetry: Art and Science | 12th SIS-Symmetry Congress [Special Issue]. Viana, V., Nagy, D., Xavier, J., Neiva, A., Ginoulhiac, M., Mateus, L. & Varela, P. (Eds.). Symmetry: Art and Science. Porto: International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry, 2022. (with Carvalho, A., Santos, C., Teixeira, T.)
  • The Recreational Problems of Tratado de Prática Darysmetica by Gaspar Nicolas, 1519, Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics (the CSHPM 2021 volume) 2023, pp. 47–56. (with Pedro Freitas)
  • The Loterias Lisbonenses of Francisco Giraldes Barba, in British Journal for the History of Mathematics, 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2258331 (with Pedro Freitas)

References

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