... was a merchant; he had a grocery store that sold everything: from bread to shaving equipment, from wine to bananas.

I have a sister, two years older than me, who was an excellent student, in everything she did she was better, although she was incredibly modest and in particular she was an excellent student of mathematics and was a student of the same teacher as me. And she inspired me because she taught her classmates at home and I attended those classes. So when it was my turn to study those things at school, I had already learned them at home.

This is the first part of the general topology course given by the author as part of his teaching of higher geometry during the year 1954 for 2nd and 3rd year mathematics students at the Faculty of Philosophy of Rio de Janeiro. This presentation, clear and precise, interspersed with examples and exercises, follows Nicolas Bourbaki fairly closely and can constitute an excellent introduction to the latter's treatise on general topology.

There were in Chicago the Senior Maths Club and the Junior Maths Club, one for teachers and one for students, and each organised a series of lectures on Wednesdays. One week the lecture was given by a researcher, the following week by a student; at the Junior Maths Club, the student who gave the best lecture of the year won this prize. When I arrived, I was asked if I wanted to give a talk; I did and won the prize. Then I was elected president of the Junior Maths Club.

I would like to express my gratitude to Professor E H Spanier for his generous help and encouragement during the preparation of this thesis.

... my intention since I was a boy was to be a writer. I wrote a lot of nonsense, like poetry and short stories. I had a huge notebook with the rubbish I wrote. When I finished my PhD, I reread everything, saw that it was second-rate stuff, and then I tore it up and threw it away. So I decided to write about mathematics, because I was always concerned with helping to create a group of people in Brazil who were very competent in mathematics. And so I started writing books because I thought and still think that books are the best way for you to develop and disseminate knowledge.

... there are no classes there, only 6 seminars - and a fabulous working environment, with a huge library. There are a hundred houses for visiting members, where I lived that year, attending seminars and doing research; twice a month I went to New York to talk to Steve Smale, who worked at Columbia University. When the year ended, the Guggenheim Foundation renewed my scholarship for another 12 months, which is unusual. So I went to Columbia University and lived in New York; when my period was about to end, I received an invitation to stay at the University. I also had offers from the University of Massachusetts and later from the University of Maryland. I turned them all down and went back to Brazil, but not to IMPA, because I decided to accept an invitation from the University of Brasília.

I think that the IMPA is unique at a world level, not in the sense of being exceptional. It is unique because it is a first world institute in a third world country. It is an institution that, for various reasons, has managed to maintain itself and reach an excellent level, despite never having had an exceptional position or any privilege within the scheme of scientific policy in Brazil. For some time the IMPA was more famous, more respected, outside than inside Brazil. Today this is no longer true. However, its scientific prestige is not reflected, for example, in the prestige of professors who have very low salaries, even in comparison with the salaries of Brazilian federal universities. IMPA salaries are lower and some privileges that teachers have, we don't have. We are not considered teachers. Although it is an institution accredited by the Ministry of Education to offer Master's and Doctoral degrees, the members are not professors, they are researchers.

Elon Lages Lima is the author of the best mathematics textbooks that, over the last forty years, have been written in Portuguese. His books in the Projecto Euclides and Matemática Universitaria collections, successively republished by IMPA (National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), not only contributed to the learning of generations of students, but also conveyed to them a taste for elegant exposition, lucid and orderly maths topics. It is worth naming some of these books: in the Projecto Euclides collection, the two-volume Analysis Course (the first one already has eleven editions) and the text on Metric Spaces; and, in the Matemática Universitaria collection, the Linear Algebra manual, where, through its exquisite exposition and original perspective, Elon manages to breathe new life into a subject that the profusion of textbooks has trivialised to the point of irrelevance. Both Metric Spaces and Linear Algebra won the Jabuti Prize awarded by the Brazilian Book Chamber for the best science book published in that country in the respective year (1978 and 1996).

To fulfil his vocation as a writer, Elon has written assiduously, always about mathematics. After the university manuals, in recent years he dedicated his attention to secondary education (equivalent to our secondary education), directing an improvement course for teachers that has been running at IMPA since 1990 and launching, as support for the course, a collection of books, Meu Professor de Matemática, which now has 19 titles, 12 of which he authored (alone or in partnership). They are elementary books, which clarify and deepen the curricular themes of mathematics of this teaching level; their value and usefulness, however, far transcend the immediate purpose for which they were written: any professor or student of mathematics, in any country or educational level, could read them with pleasure and profit (if the language were not an obstacle).