The Instituto de Matemática Aplicada del Litoral "Dra. Eleonor Harboure" (IMAL), dependent on the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET) and Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL), is an institute dedicated to basic and applied research, the training of human resources, the linkage, and the dissemination of Mathematics, with its headquarters in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. IMAL is part of the community of the Centro Científico Tecnológico (CCT-CONICET-Santa Fe), which includes another seventeen science and technology research institutes.

History of its formation

IMAL was formed on the basis of the Programa Especial de Matemática Aplicada (PEMA), created in 1977 by CONICET, as a dependency of the Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química (INTEC).

PEMA emerged as a product of collaboration among pioneering individuals who were entrepreneurial, visionary, and highly academic. The history of PEMA is inexorably marked by the names of two engineers: Alberto Cassano and Orlando Villamayor, who were leading INTEC and the Instituto Argentino de Matemática (IAM) at that time, respectively.  The former provided infrastructure support and administrative mechanisms, while the latter assumed the academic direction during its early years of existence.

In 1977 Ramón Cerro (resercher at INTEC) met two young mathematicians in Minnesota, Eleonor Harbore and Néstor Aguilera, who were finishing their Ph. D. in Mathematics and contacted them with Dr. Alberto Cassano who, after consulting Villamayor, proposed that they form a group of Applied Mathematics in Santa Fe.  They accepted and in 1978 PEMA was born.  The first researchers of PEMA were Ph.D. Harboure and Ph.D. Aguilera, and four years after its creation, in 1981, Ph.D. Roberto Macías joined. Thanks to the efforts of these three researchers and the unwavering support of  Engr. Villamayor, PEMA grew through the training of fellows and the recruitment of new researchers.  The first PEMA Academic Coordinator (position created in 1979 at INTEC) was Néstor Aguilera during the period 1980-1981, followed by Roberto Macías (1982-1985) and, finally, by Eleonor Harboure (1986).

Finally, in 1999, it was established as an executing unit, creating the Instituto de Matemática Aplicada del Litoral (nowadays IMAL "Dra. Eleonor Harboure") with a joint dependency of CONICET and UNL.

From its creation, the direction of IMAL was in charge of Eleonor Harboure, Hugo Aimar, Beatriz Viviani and Rubén Spies, who is currently the Director of IMAL.