April 14, 2000–The new Mathematica Technical Center (MTC) at the University Federal of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil was inaugurated on March 29, 2000. The opening ceremony included presentations by Professor Segen Estefen, Director of COPPE/UFRJ, and Professor Renato Cotta, General Coordinator for the MTC, as well as a videoconference with strategic executives from Wolfram Research, Inc. The event also included a tour of the new training and technical facilities, which are hosted by the Laboratory of Transmission and Technology of Heat of the Mechanical Engineering Department of EE/COPPE, UFRJ.

The MTC is a Mathematica training, research, and consulting center under the co-sponsorship and technical support of Wolfram Research. The MTC will provide the general public with Mathematica training and consulting services on both an individual and a group basis. It offers a wide range of courses to fit a variety of needs and interests–covering everything from a basic introduction to Mathematica to numerical analysis to more-advanced field-specific applications of Mathematica within different disciplines. The center will also help stimulate and contribute to computer-aided learning initiatives of the regular academic units of UFRJ at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels.

Mathematica–the international leading software system for numerical, symbolic, and graphical computation–lets users solve, visualize, and harness the power of mathematics without the pencil-and-paper, calculator, or complex custom-software approaches that were previously necessary. Mathematica is revolutionizing the way work is done and presented in research, education, and publishing. Many new textbooks are being written in Mathematica‘s platform-independent notebook format, while research papers prepared with Mathematica are completed faster, easier, and more professionally.

“The idea for the Mathematica Technical Center came from conversations I had with Professor Renato Cotta and Professor Mikhail Mikhailov at the university during my trip to Brazil last September, and we’re delighted to see this idea become a reality so quickly,” said Anya Foreman, International Business Development Executive for Wolfram Research. “I hope that many of our users will take the time to see what the center has to offer and will take advantage of this unique opportunity to optimize their Mathematica licenses.”