Maria Elisa Fernandes

Department of Mathematics
University of Aveiro (UA)
Campus de Santiago
3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal
email: maria.elisa@ua.pt
ORCID: 0000-0001-7386-4254

♥ My main areas of interest are Algebra and Combinatorics. I am particularly interested in Permutation Group Theory and its applications, namely in the study of symmetries of geometric objects such as Abstract Polytopes.

Maria Elisa Fernandes
I was honored to be one of the plenary speakers at SIGMAP 2022 in Alaska. This picture was there! Alaska, 2022

I completed my PhD at UA in Aveiro in 2008 and two years later I took a Postdoctoral position at ULB in Brussels. In June 2025, I obtained the title of Agregado (a postdoctoral qualification comparable to the Habilitation) from the University of Aveiro.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to visit several prestigious institutions, including the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the Fields Institute in Toronto, and the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca.

I had the honor of being a plenary speaker at the conference, TCA 2025, alongside distinguished mathematicians such as Peter Cameron, Persi Diaconis, Martin Liebeck, Eamonn O’Brien, Cheryl Praeger, and others.

My Erdős number is 2 (by virtue of my collaboration with the distinguished mathematician Peter Cameron).

I am always committed to defending the importance of mathematics in today's society. Here's my participation on RTP3, a Portuguese Public TV channel: UAU-Ciência sem limites.

I was awarded the Chaire Internationale IN of the Université Libre de Bruxelles on two occasions, in 2022 and again in 2025, in recognition of my collaborative research with Dimitri Leemans.

Publications


  1. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Jessica Anzanello, Pablo Spiga, The maximal rank of a string group generated by involutions for alternating groups, Journal of Group Theory, 40 pp (2026).

  2. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Regular polytopes of rank n/2 for transitive groups of degree n, Journal of Algebra, Vol. 689 Pages 256-296, 41 pp (2026).

  3. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, The degrees of the orientation-preserving automorphism groups of toroidal maps and hypermaps, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, vol. 61, 55, 18 pp (2025).

  4. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Olivia Reade, String C-group representations of transitive groups: a case study with degree 11, Art Discrete Appl. Math, vol.7, 2 #P2.07, 29 pp (2024).

  5. Peter J. Cameron, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, The number of string C-groups of high rank, Adv. Math., 453, #109832, 49 pp (2024).

  6. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, The degrees of regular polytopes of type [4,4,4], SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics,36, 2 , 1143-1155, 12 pp (2022).

  7. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Asia Ivić Weiss, Two families of locally toroidal regular 4-hypertopes arising from toroids, Contemporary Mathematics, 776 (2021).

  8. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Correction to "Faithful permutation representations of toroidal regular maps", Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, 733-738 (2021).

  9. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Asia Ivić Weiss, An Exploration of Locally Spherical Regular Hypertopes, Discrete Comput Geom 64, 519–534, 2020.

  10. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Faithful permutation representations of toroidal regular maps, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics. 52 (2020), 317-337.

  11. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, The degrees of toroidal regular proper hypermaps, Art Discrete Appl. Math, 4 (2021), \#P3.13.

  12. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, String C-group representations of alternating groups, Ars Math. Contemp. 17, 2019, 291-310.

  13. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, An extension of the classification of high rank regular polytopes, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 370 (12), 2018, 8833-8857.

  14. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, C-groups of high rank for the symmetric groups, Journal of Algebra, 508, 2018, 196-218.

  15. Domenico Catalano, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Isabel Hubard, Dimitri Leemans, Hypertopes with tetrahedral diagram, The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 25, 2018, 1-21.

  16. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Asia Avic Weiss, Hexagonal extensions of toroidal maps and hypermaps, Marston Conder, Antoine Deza, Asia Ivić Weiss, Discrete Geometry and Symmetry, 147-170, Springer, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, 2018.

  17. Peter J. Cameron, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, Highest rank of a polytope for An, Proc. London Math. Soc. 115, 2017, 135-176.

  18. Peter J. Cameron, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, String C-groups as transitive subgroups of Sn, Journal of Algebra, 447, 2016, 468-478.

  19. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Asia Avic Weiss, Highly symmetric hypertopes, Aequationes Math. 90, 2016, 1045-1067.

  20. António Breda D' Azevedo, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Classification of the regular oriented hypermaps with a prime number of hyperfaces, Ars Mathematica Contemporanea, 10, n.1, 2016, 193-209.

  21. António Breda D'Azevedo, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Classification of regular maps with prime number of faces and the asymptotic behaviour of their reflexible to chiral ratio, Discrete Mathematics, 338 (11), 2015, 1873-1882.

  22. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, Corrigendum to Polytopes of high rank for the symmetric groups, Advances in Mathematics, 228, 2013, 3207-3222.

  23. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, All alternating groups An with n≥12 have polytopes of rank ⎿(n-1)/2⏌, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 26, 2012, nº 2, 482-498.

  24. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Mark Mixer, Polytopes of High Rank for the Alternating Groups, Journal of Combinatorial Theory A, 119, 2012, 42-56.

  25. Maria Elisa Fernandes, Dimitri Leemans, Polytopes of High Rank for the symmetric groups, Advances in Mathematics, 228, 2011, 3207-3222.

  26. António Breda D'Azevedo, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Ilda Inácio Rodrigues, A note on chirality groups and smallest regular coverings of bipartite regular oriented maps, Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal, vol. 61, nr. 4, 2011, 1037-1047.

  27. António Breda D'Azevedo, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Classification of Primer hypermaps with a prime number of hyperfaces, European Journal of Combinatorics, 32, 2011, 233-242.

  28. António Breda D'Azevedo, Maria Elisa Fernandes, Regular Oriented Hypermaps Up To Five Hyperfaces, Acta Univ. M. Belii, ser. Math., 17, 2010, 21-39.

I am a member of the editorial board of Innovations in Incidence Geometry.

@ UA

I am a member of the Scientific Council and of the Math Department Council, and former Director of the Bachelor of Mathematics.

I have been teaching at the Math Department for twenty years. I was in charge of the following courses: Graphs and Combinatorics; Algebraic Structures; Advanced Topics in Algebra, Logic and Computation; Elements of Geometry. I also taught: Discrete Mathematics; Linear Algebra and Calculus.

I had one PhD student, Claudio Alexandre Piedade, who defended his thesis Faithful permutation representations of C-groups, on April 26, 2022, unanimously approved with distinction and praise.

Presently I am a researcher of the Optimization, Graph Theory and Combinatorics Group of CIDMA. Previously, I was a member of the Algebra and Geometry Group of CIDMA, and for two years served as Scientific Coordinator of that group.


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