This year marks the centenary of the birth of Professor José Quintino Rogado, a visionary who revolutionized the teaching and practice of Mining Engineering in Portugal. Técnico is immensely proud to have had him as one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century.

In the 1960s, José Quintino Rogado, a mining engineer trained at Técnico, was the technical director of the Cassinga iron mines in southern Angola. He encountered a challenge and raised a problem that triggered one of the most significant structural changes in mining engineering practice: the lack of mathematical models for characterizing mineral resources hindered the planning and management of these resources for short- and medium-term production forecasts.

A chance encounter with a young French geoscientist, Georges Matheron, who was testing the first geostatistical models on the gold deposits of Witswatersrand in South Africa, provided the solution to this methodological bottleneck. José Quintino Rogado realized that the models developed by Matheron at the newly established Geostatistics Center in Fontainebleau held the key to transforming the methodological framework of mining engineering, particularly in the evaluation of reserves and production planning.

In the early 1970s, Quintino Rogado, by then a full professor at Técnico, sent his assistant professors, Henrique Garcia Pereira, Fernando Muge, and Leopoldo Cortez, to Fontainebleau to learn the new methodologies of this scientific field. This period coincided with a drastic shift towards automatic calculation, thanks to the increased availability of computers and the exponential growth in computing power. Problems that were previously difficult to tackle analytically began to have rapid and reliable algorithmic solutions within the framework of numerical calculation.

Thus, Técnico became one of the first international schools to teach geostatistical models for mineral resource characterization and optimization methodologies (Operational Research) in Mine Planning, as well as new disciplines that began to form part of mining engineering practice. Generations of students trained at Técnico, upon entering the mining industry, laid the foundations of modern mining engineering. This entire transformation was due to the vision of José Quintino Rogado.

By paying homage to Professor Quintino Rogado, the Mineral and Energy Resources Engineering Department and Técnico Lisboa fulfill the most elementary and noble duty towards their best teachers, and in doing so, preserve their history to better project their future as a reference school.