Create an undergraduate Mathematics degree at IST: Applied Mathematics and Computing (LMAC)

The idea was to open undergraduate education in Mathematics at IST for the first time, aimed at being the strongest Mathematical Sciences undergraduate degree in Portugal and to be competitive internationally.

Luis Magalhães, who had been the first proponent of offering an undergraduate Mathematics degree at IST, coordinated the Program design in 1984-85 and was the Program Coordinator from 1986 to 1990.

The plan was to initiate the Program in 1986/87 with 15 students to be admitted for the 1st year and to also admit students for the 3rd year transferring from existing IST Engineering degree programs. As the first IST undergraduate degree in Physics – Technological Physics Engineering – would begin one year earlier admitting only students for the 3rd year and it would admit 15 1st year students for the first time also in 1986/87, the two Programs would initiate admission of 1st year students at the same time, and it was arranged that the classes on basic Mathematics and Physics subjects would be taught to students of the two Programs in joint classes.

To ensure high employability of the degree graduates it was decided it should be on Mathematical Sciences and not only in Mathematics sensu stricto, with emphasis in the core Mathematics areas of Mathematical Analysis, Geometry, Topology, Algebra, Probability, and also on Statistics and Computing, and students should benefit of the opportunities available in the IST Engineering and Physics degrees by requiring the students to acquire a significative share of credits enrolling in courses offered for those degrees. The two initial years were on the same core courses for all Majors and at the end of the 2nd year the students had to choose one of the Majors and the Minors to be taken through courses in the Engineering or Physics degree Programs, with great flexibility managed through individual Plans of Study to be negotiated by each student with the Mathematics Program Coordinator and were valid for enrollment only after approval by the Program Coordinator. All students were required to prepare an Undergraduate Thesis, for what the required course load in the final year would be half of preceding years. For these reasons, it was conceived as a 5 year Program, at a time when all the other Mathematics degrees offered by Portuguese universities were 4 years long.

The course structure was highly innovative . It was based on a core curriculum in the first two years, common to all students and on 3 Majors in the last three years: and it provided for great flexibility in the study program for each student, through the choice of one or two Minor areas, by selecting subjects offered by any of the IST Engineering degrees programs, and a choice of course credits in the other Program Majors.

The three basic semester Physics courses for the IST Engineering programs (Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics) were mandatory in this Mathematics Program, what was unprecedented in Mathematics programs offered in Portugal. The requirement of 3 semester courses on Physics remains to date despite the restrictive changes determined by the Bologna Process in 2006 that led to shorten the Program from 5 to 3 years long, and more recently aggravated by the ill-informed and disastrous curricular change adopted at IST (the transition of most IST courses to just 7 weeks!, the adoption of intensive courses with the double teaching load (8 contact hours/week!), the reduction of the mandatory basic Mathematics and Physics courses (the courses on Mathematical Analysis with a cut of 23%!), a disruptive students assessment system in the courses by too many short superficial tests/quizzes (distracting students from serious study, and even leading many to skip class attendance!).

The Program structure allowed students a wide range of choices and a great variety of combinations with application areas presented and studied from the perspective of the professors of those very areas, instead of how mathematicians see them. Examples of individual choices of application Minors that actually occurred were: among others.

The Program as also highly innovative at IST and in Portugal, since it was the only IST degree Program with: The last two features wre adopted for students to have plenty of time to deepen the study and mature concepts, and to avoid excessive dispersion in different subjects.

Several reputed foreign Mathematicians were asked to express their opinion on the planned degree Program, namely Jack Hale, George Sell, David Kinderlehrer and Ettore Infante (the latter had been the Director of Mathematical Sciences programs at NSF for 6 years and was at the time the Dean of the School of Sciences of the U. of Minnesota), who all expressed high praise for the Program design, and Ettore Infante even said he would wish a Program like that could be offered at his School.

The number of 1st year students admitted to the Program was quickly raised to 30 in the years following the launching of the program.

In 1989-90, Luis Magalhães coordinated a Program restructure, based on the experience of the first three years operation and the first graduation of students, and with main incidence on the Computing Major. This Major was initially mainly on Numerical Analysis, Computer Languages Programming, Mathematical Programming (optimization) and Simulation, due to the lack of wider competencies in the existing IST Mathematiucs Department faculty at the time. This had drastically changed by a recent hiring of two Professors of Computing Theory formerly at the Faculty of Sciences of the U. of Lisbon. The main changes were: Thus, the Program Majors became: the latter with emphasis in Computer Theory and Computer Science.

This undergraduate degree Program contributed decisively to the fast qualification of the IST Mathematics Department faculty with its most talented graduates. The first graduates were the student who entered to the Program for the 3rd year of studies and had study programs with the first two years basic Mathematics courses they were lacking at the same time as the new students, and advanced Mathematics courses offered by the ongoing Applied Mathematics Master Program, finished in 1989. They were: Besides, some students of the IST Physics Program in 1986 enrolled in many courses of the IST Mathematics Program and attended Mathematics Seminars, and ended up pursueing career at the IST Mathematics Department: The last 4 were a very cohese group of top students of the IST Physics Program who entered to this program 1st year when it was first offered in 1986.
Another top student who had entered to the that IST Physics Program in the same year transferred to the IST Mathematics Program at the end of the 1st academic year: Thus, the creation of this undegraduate Mathematics degree proved immediately with the first graduation class its great value to enhance the quality of the IST Mathematics Department faculty, and was an important source of incoming talent for several years on.

The IST Undergraduate Mathematics degree Program established itself immeadiately after creation as the most advanced in the country, attracting the best student group among other Mathematics programs in Portugal, at a considerable distance of other Mathematics programs, beginning in its first year, within the Top 100 Programs (in more than 1000) in all areas as ranked by the minimum grade required for admission in the national competition for entrance in all Portuguse public universities. This is the most visible indicator of comparison of university degree programs in Portugal, receiving wide attention every year in TV and daily journals and by general citizens, and is the most influential indicator to how candidates apply to different programs. The Program also provided full employability to its graduates since the beginning, mostly in the finance, insurance and consulting sectors, besides higher education institutions.

The IST Mathematics Program performance in attracting top students was negatively affected in 2001 by the beginning of another undergraduate degree program also offered by the IST Mathematics Department - Information Sciences - admitting for the 1st year 25 students. The IST Mathematics Program declined to 280th in the mentioned ranking and for the first time did not fill up all the 30 positions it offered. This serious mistake was recognized by the IST Mathematics Department just two years after launching the new Program, following an analysis by Luis Magalhães who had returned to IST in 2002 after a leave of absence of 5 years as President of the Science and Technology Foundation (FCT), and was quickly corrected by terminating the acceptance of students to the new Program in 2004, but the recovery of the damage took 7 years more, when the IST Mathematics Program reentered the Top 100 in the mentioned indicator and filled up all offered admission positions which, however, had to be reduced to 27.

After this, the Program returned to admit 30 students yearly and raised steadily in the ranking, reaching the Top 20 in 2015, where it remained up to 2022, while increasing steadily the number of admitted students up to 62. In this period it even reached in 2018 the Top 4 (in more than 1000 undergraduate degrees programs in all possible areas!) and was in the Top 8 for 6 years including consecutively from 2016 to 2020; an amazing performance for a Mathematics Program! However, the increase of the number of admitted students was too much to sustain that success and the Program left the Top 20 in the following years, although in the Top 100 and still admitting a large number of students with high grades in the national entrance competition (in 2025, 43 of the 68 students admitted had entrance grade ≥18/20). Anyway, giving the high visibility of the mentioned indicator and the influence it has on prospective candidates choices, a reduction of the number of students admissions should have been decided with the goal of returning to the highly visible and recognized Top 20, as was recommended to the Mathematics Department management in 2023, but unfortunately was not done, becoming more difficult to correct as time goes on, and remains requiring urgent fixing.

Another issue is that the implementation of the Bologna Reform in 2006 forced this Program to be a 3 years Bologna 1st cycle program. Although it could be continued with an existing 2 years Bologna 2nd cycle Program offered by the IST Mathematics Department, this change irremediably severed the overall concept of the initial Program, in particular, its relationship with the IST Engineering and Physics programs which gave it a unique character worldwide, considered of distinctive high value. However, it continues to be an Excellent Program when compared with other first degree university Mathematics programs, both nationally and internationally.