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In here I intend to tell you ALL about me. I'm the guy behind the equation up there but that much you probably knew already. So, let's start from the beginning.
How far back you wanna go today? OK. To keep going let's say that I was brought into life in a little village surrounded by a Roman wall, pretty much like a cemetery, in the north west of Spain, which is a country on the boundary of Europe and Africa and (if you allow me to use intrinsic coordinates) also of America. I could have said instead that I am an associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics in the state university of new york at albany. But that has been said toooo many times and besides I like the weekend costume of the previous way better. My parents, for reasons of their own, crossed the boundary to South America at around the time Kennedy was being assassinated in the US. I was almost seven when I found myself growing on the one dimensional island of Chile and for the next ten years I learned the local language and how to use the slide rule at the crowded rooms of the Marist's brothers in Santiago. One day my parents came home crying. The doctors had diagnosed my mother with Cancer of the uterus and she died a year later. We were two brothers and two sisters, of whom I was sixteen and the eldest. Two months later my father killed himself in a car accident. There I was, adrift on the island with my slide rule. One month later the whole country was nuked and with it my old rule. No doubt, the hit me plenty level of Doom was based on me in Chile 1973.
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Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar (A. Machado) or Que sera, sera. (Doris Day) That is the question. |
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I was ready for answers. My heroes were Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir. Being and Nothiness?... A piece of cacke! I started studying Mathematics and Physics at the University of Chile. During the second year, the brand new IBM/360, with 1 full meg. of main memory, ranked me as 5th among the 5,000 students of Physical Sciences and Mathematics which included all the Engineering schools. My uncle, brought me from Europe a pocket calculator that was able to do square roots but soon some of my friends had jewels with keys for sines and logs as well.
The day I found my Simone de Beauvoir in the body and soul of Monica Larrea I realized that the singing above was not a question, but an answer. We now have sixteen years together, two Ph.D.s, two sons, two jobs (in the same university), two cars (a Honda and a Toyota) but only one cat and one house with a one car garage that contains one (but Big) statue of liberty in local suburbia USA. Oh, I forgot the one 30 year mortgage and an irrational uncountable unbelievable number of credit cards not to mention several other very legally believable bank loans. We flew from Santiago to Stony Brook (Long Island) and the first thing we learned was that we were Hispanics. We had no idea. My name became a weapon. I learned, early on during my process of acculturation that all I needed to do was to announce myself aloud at a cocktail party to produce hands up into the air and the proverbial desintegration of Champaign glasses onto the floor. We keep learning daily on TV about ourselves, who we are, what we have accomplished as a group and the truly magical possibilities of our accents. Only other aliens like us have the senses to understand these special powers. Our kids will have the opportunity of discovering all of it early on at school so they will not be surprised later as we did.
The Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook was at that time incorrectly ranked for it had an external supply of pure oxygen from the lungs of Herbert Robbins. To be continued... (Maximum Entropy, Herbert Robbins, John VanRyzin, Manhattan... and the playing of tic-tac-T.O.E.) |
The Beginning
