Aramat is a blue mackaw composed by several mathematical elements, including a logarithmic spiral.
Its name is a combination of the Portuguese words for mackaw (“arara”) and Mathematics.
Aramat is the official mascot for the Brazilian
Biennium of Mathematics 2017-2018.
As reported in December/2016, during this period our country will host the International Mathematical Olympiad
and the International Congress of Mathematics for the first time. The Biennium goal is to seize on the momentum
generated by these two international events and use it to disseminate Mathematics in Brazilian society.
Our idea for the mascot was to build bridges between Brazilian mathematicians and the country’s schoolchildren.
Despite our many outreach activities –
including mathematical
competitions with around 18 million participants, much remains to be done in order to make our discipline better
known and more approachable to our national fellow mathmaticians.
Having this in mind, we decided that the mascot should be conceived by the children themselves. A contest for the mascot took place,
and schools from all over Brazil submitted suggestions for the contest. The winners come from Instituto Federal do Triângulo Mineiro,
a high school in Uberaba, in the state of Minas Gerais. Their design combines some mathematical symbolism with a reference to the rich Brazilian fauna.
