Silvano Falcao
Instructor of Mathematics
My goal is to inspire students, and this is not just one more of those teacher’s commonplaces, but the expression of my way of thinking and my pedagogy. I am not simply interested in inculcating principles, I want to infect people with this contagious desire to understand the language on what Universe was written: Mathematics! (well, I wanted to write more, but there was a limit of 75 words!)
Biography
I was born in Brazil, where I lived 2/3 of my life (the other 1/3 was lived here, in the USA). My father (deceased) taught Portuguese, Greek, and Hebrew at a Baptist seminar, and my mother was a Geography teacher.
When I was a teenager, I was interested in several different things, ranging from martial arts, hunting, mental puzzles, to literature. I also loved to write (chronicles, short stories, etc.). I still keep some of these hobbies. After reading David Livingstone's biography, I wanted to become a missionary, but reading the books of the Brazilian writer Ruben Alves helped me to get me out of this path. I got a bachelor's degree in math Education, in Brazil, and a master's degree in pure mathematics, in US (Auburn University: War Eagle!!!!)
I am married to Érika Pessoa Falcão since June of 2004, but no children yet (planning for this year!). Well, this is just a brief micro-summary of a synthetic synopsis of a short bio.Education
- Master of Science, Mathematics; Area of Study: Harmonic and Functional Analysis, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
- BS in Mathematics Education (the degree came along with an habilitation to teach Physics), Universidade Federal do Piauí, Teresina, Brazil
- Internship to attend advanced courses on Real Analysis, IMPA – Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, Rio de Janeiro
Interests
I have a lot of interests, as mentioned in my attached resume, but the current ones are: the practice of Aikido (it is a very interesting martial art!); solving gigantic Rubik's cubes (my last one was 9x9x9); reading about nutrition and raw food.Publications
Master’s thesis and contents: “A Special Banach Space and its Duality”, Auburn RBD Library (4th Floor), QA 323 .F35 2003. Studied a special kind of function space, its properties, and the computation of its dual space via incorporating the results of Radon Nikodym’s Theorem. This is a topic on the Harmonic Analysis.Editor and writer of Lee County Schools Mathematics Journal, 2009.
An Abstract Approach to Trigonometry (to be published at MAA’s Mathematics Magazine): All trigonometric formulas can be derived without appealing to geometry, in a pure abstract way.