Nelson Merentes

Nelson José Merentes Díaz
Nelson José Merentes Díaz
Born	May 6, 1954 (age 72); Venezuela
Occupation(s)	Mathematician, academic researcher, politician
Known for	President of the Central Bank of Venezuela, Minister of Finance, Minister of Science and Technology

Nelson José Merentes Díaz (born May 6, 1954) is a Venezuelan mathematician, academic researcher, and political figure.

Academic background

Merentes obtained his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the Central University of Venezuela in 1978 and subsequently undertook advanced studies in Economics and Finance. He earned his PhD in Mathematics with summa cum laude distinction at Eötvös Loránd University located in Budapest, Hungary, in 1991.

The majority of his scholarly research and teaching career took place at the Central University of Venezuela, where he held a professorship and contributed to multiple academic councils and committees.

Roles in public administration

Throughout his career, Merentes occupied significant positions within Venezuela’s government. Between 2000 and 2001, he presided over the Economy and Finance subcommittee of the National Legislative Committee and acted as deputy minister of Regulation and Control at the Ministry of Finance. In 2001, President Hugo Chavez appointed him as Minister of Finance, a post he maintained until 2002 before transitioning to Minister of Science and Technology. Subsequently, he directed the Social Development Bank (BANDES) prior to returning to lead the Ministry of Finance in early 2004, during which time the National Development Fund (FONDEN) was established. From April 2009 until 2013, Merentes was the president of the Central Bank of Venezuela.

In April 2013, under President Nicolás Maduro’s administration, he was once again named Minister of Finance. By January 2014, he reassumed the presidency of the Central Bank of Venezuela.

Sanctions

In 2017, Canada imposed sanctions on Merentes along with other Venezuelan officials under the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, citing their involvement in severe human rights abuses and major corruption.

Scholarly publications

As an academic researcher, Merentes has authored over 200 scientific articles, primarily addressing topics such as differential equations and Lipschitz continuity. Some of his key works include:

On the Composition Operator in AC[a, b] (1991)
On the Composition Operator in BV φ[a; b] (1991)
On Functions of Bounded (p,k)-Variation (1992) (with S. Rivas and J. L. Sánchez)
Characterization of Globally Lipschitzian Composition Operators in the Banach Space BV²_p [a, b] (1992) (with J. Matkowski)
Explicit Petree's function of interpolation of the spaces H_p^s (1993)
On the Composition Operator between RV_p [a, b] and BV [a, b] (1995) (with S. Rivas)
Uniformly Continuous Set-valued Composition Operators in Spaces of Functions of Bounded Variation in the Sense of Wiener (2010) (with A. Azócar, J. A. Guerrero and J. Matkowski)
Locally Lipschitz Composition Operators in Spaces of Functions of Bounded Variation (2010) (with J. Appell and J.L. Sanchez)
Measures of Noncompactness in the Study of Asymptotically Stable Solutions of Integral Equations (2010) (with J. Appell and J. Banaś)
Exact Controllability of Semilinear Stochastic Evolution Equation (2011) (with D. Barráez, H. Leiva and M. Narváez)
Integral Representation of Functions of Bounded Second Φ-Variation in the Sense of Schramm (2011) (with J. Giménez and S. Rivas)
Approximate Controllability of Semilinear Reaction Diffusion Equations (2012) (with H. Leiva and J. L. Sánchez)
Uniformly Bounded Set-valued Composition Operators in Spaces of Functions of Bounded Variation in the Sense of Schramm (2012) (with T. Ereú, J. L. Sánchez and M. Wróbel)

References