Noticias en español
- One of the congresses was focused on Mathematical Optimization, Prof. Fabián Flores’ area of expertise, while the other brought together different perspectives on applied mathematics.
Prof. Fabián Flores Bazán, associate researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at the University of Chile and professor in the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the University of Concepción (UdeC), is an internationally renowned specialist in non-convex mathematical optimization problems.
This has been demonstrated once again, as he was invited to participate as an international speaker at two scientific meetings held in Peru this semester. The first was the 38th National Mathematics Colloquium, organized by the Peruvian Mathematical Society (SMP), which took place at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) campus in Lima from Monday, August 11, to Friday, August 15, and featured eleven thematic sessions, eight mini-courses, and more than 40 lectures.
At this event, Dr. Flores—winner of the 2007 Municipal Science Award from the City of Concepción—presented a lecture entitled ‘A class of non-convex functions and their use in mathematical optimization‘, in which he explained, “a family of functions is identified that contains classic functions, such as convex or coercive functions, but also quasi-convex quadratic functions. The latter are very useful in the field of economics, for example”, given “that functions whose sublevels are convex sets (called quasi-convex functions) play an important role in that field”.
In addition to his talk, Dr. Flores spent time at the conference promoting the UdeC’s PhD program in Applied Sciences with a minor in Mathematical Engineering.
In the context of this conference, Professor Flores was invited to participate in the program ‘MATEhablando,’ produced by the Communications Department of the PUCP, to discuss his scientific career and the current development of optimization in Latin America.
Meanwhile, during the first week of October, the researcher participated in the sixteenth edition of the International Seminar on Optimization and Related Areas (ISORA), held at the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (Cusco) and co-organized by the Faculty of Sciences of the National University of Engineering (UNI, Lima).
This event has positioned itself as one of the most important in the field in Latin America, and its first edition was organized by Professor Flores in July 1993 at the UNI.
Professor Flores, who was also a member of the event’s Organizing Committee, presented the talk ‘Inhomogeneous versions of Brickman’s and Polyak’s convexity theorems‘, in which the CMM researcher discussed “the algebraic conditions that quadratic functions must satisfy in order to obtain the convexity of the image of the unit sphere through such functions; as well as for the image of the entire space using three quadratic functions”.
“These types of results are very useful for studying quadratic optimization problems with equally quadratic constraints, models that arise in countless applications, although their use can extend beyond the field of optimization”, said Flores, who is also an academic at the UdeC’s Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
“After two consecutive editions held outside the Peruvian capital, the next edition will take place at the Institute of Mathematics and Related Sciences, once again in Lima, in 2027”, Professor Flores said about this event.
By Iván R. Tobar Bocaz, CMM Communications.
Posted on Dec 1, 2025 in News
