Due to some logistic and budget constraints, the editorial board of the bulletin decided to change the policy and publish a single issue per year.
In this number of the bulletin, we initiate a cycle of articles dedicated
to honouring the work and dedication to mathematical research of distinguished Portuguese mathematicians who have recently retired. Since there are many such examples, the editorial board decided to start by those who were directly connected to the history of CIM. Hence, this issue features an interview to Ivette Gomes, who belonged to the first Scientific Council of CIM and had a prominent role in promoting and stimulating the Portuguese community of statisticians.

Alfio Quarteroni (born 30 May 1952) is Professor of Numerical Analysis at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Director of MOX. He is the founder of MOX at Politecnico di Milano (2002), the founder of MATHICSE at EPFL, Lausanne (2010), the co-founder (and President) of MOXOFF, a spin-off company at Politecnico di Milano (2010). Co-founder of MATHESIA (2015) and of MATH&SPORT (2016).
He is author of 25 books, editor of 5 books, author of more than 300 papers published in international Scientific Journals and Conference Proceedings, member of the editorial board of 25 International Journals and Editor in Chief of two book series published by Springer.
Among his awards and honors are: the NASA Group Achievement Award for the pioneering work in Computational Fluid Dynamics in 1992, the Fanfullino della Riconoscenza 2006, Città di Lodi,
the Premio Capo D’Orlando 2006, the Ghislieri prize 2013, the International Galileo Galilei prize for Sciences 2015, and the Euler Lecture 2017.

The 140th European Study Group with Industry (ESGI140) was held at Barreiro, from the 4th to the 8th of June 2018, and it was organized by the Barreiro School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal along with PT- MATHS-IN. This has been the 12th time that this suc- cessful European instrument for cooperation between Mathematics and the Industry took place in Portugal.

Daniel da Silva was a remarkable Scientist and Mathematician of the mid 19th century. Working in Portugal, isolated from the main scientific centers of the time, his investigations in pure mathematics had almost no impact. Apart from giving a short biography of his life and work, this article makes the case for considering him an unavoidable character in the History of Science and one of the founders of Discrete Mathematics, through his introduction of a key method in Enumerative Combinatorics: the Principle of Inclusion-Exclusion.

Biomathematics is a fast growing subject in Europe and to celebrate the importance of applications of mathematics to biology and life sciences, the Year of Mathematical Biology 2018 (YMB) was declared, a joint initiative of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB). With many events organized, including thematic programs and conferences and workshops, the 11th Eu- ropean Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB 2018) (http://www.ecmtb2018.org) was the main event of the YMB.

Selection acting on unobserved heterogeneity is a fun

The LxDS-Lisbon Dynamical Systems Group, the Department of Mathematics of ISEG, CEMAPRE, REM and CMAFCIO organised a spring school on the days 28-30 of May in dynamical systems, which took place at ISEG / ULisboa. The school consisted of three mini-courses in dynamical systems, which were given by specialists of recognised international merit. Namely,
- KAM theory for ultra-differentiable Hamiltonians - Abed Bounemoura, Université Paris Dauphine,
- SRB measures and inducing schemes - José Ferreira Alves, University of Porto,
- Dynamics of geodesic flows - Mark Pollicott, University of Warwick.

Coquaternions, also known in the literature as split quaternions, are elements of a four-dimensional hypercomplex real algebra generalising complex numbers. This algebra was introduced in 1849 by the English mathematician James Cockle [4], only six years after the famous discovery by Hamilton of the algebra of quaternions [12].

Maria Ivette Gomes (born 21 July 1948) is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Lisbon, editor-in-chief of REVSTAT, member of the editorial board of Extremes and researcher of the research centre of statistics and its applications of the University of Lisbon (CEAUL). She obtained a PhD in Statistics in 1978 from the University of Sheffield. She became a renown influential specialist in the field of Extremes. Together with Tiago de Oliveira, she is responsible for dynamizing a School of Extremes in Portugal, which, nowadays, counts with many researchers. She was one of the founders of SPE (the Portuguese society of statistics), which she presided from 1990 to 1993.
She was a member of the first Scientific Committee of CIM, in 1996, and a vice-president of the direction board from 2004 to 2008.

WGSCO 2018, Workshop on Graph Spectra, Combinatorics and Optimization was organized by a group of docents of the Mathematics Department and members of the Research Unit CIDMA - Center for Research and Development in Mathematics and Applications of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, on occasion of the 65th birthday of Prof. Domingos M. Cardoso, prominent professor and researcher of the University of Aveiro.

The International Center for Mathematics (www.cim.pt), in partnership with the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra (www.museudaciencia.org) and the Portuguese Mathematical Society (www.spm.pt), organized the Mathematics and Literature III, a two-day international workshop on Literature and Mathematics, with the support of the Center for Mathematics, Fundamental Applications and Operational Research of the University of Lisbon (cmafcio.campus.ciencias.ulisboa.pt), and the FCT Doctoral Program in Materialities of Literature of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra (www.apps.uc.pt/courses/en/course/2341). This initiative took place at the Municipal Museum, on the occasion of the FOLIO 2018 - Óbidos Literary International Festival (www.foliofestival.com), organised and hosted by the medieval town of Óbidos (www. obidos.pt).

A major motivation for the development of semigroup theory was, and still is, its applications to the study of formal languages. Therefore, it is not surprising that the correspondence, associating to each symbolic dynamical system X the formal language of its blocks, entails a connection between symbolic dynamics and semi- group theory. In this article we survey some developments on this connection, since when it was noticed in an article by Almeida, published in the CIM bulletin, in 2003 [2].