I started a blog on Wordpress in 2007, in part with the hope it could be a way to stay in touch with the participants of an AIM workshop on the Geometry of Character Varieties we co-organized with E. Letellier and T. Hausel.

But it was also essentially my personal excuse to have a go at producing and putting out in the world some of the kind of writing that had always been in my mind. I called the blog “Math Life” in fact, suggesting its ambiguous quality.

I have now concentrated the output of my various interests on this site. Below you can find some the short posts I wrote for the blog that I feel are worth keeping. The earliest of these posts is Dancing Numbers.

September 18, 2024

Two nights at Cattinara (in Spanish)

En junio de 2023 al volver de un viaje a Viena y Amsterdam empecé con síntomas de un resfrío fuerte. Pero la fiebre no bajaba y después de unos días llamamos al servicio médico. Terminé yendo en ambulancia al pronto soccorso del Ospedale di Cattinara en Trieste. Tenía una fea pulmonía. Mientras estuve en el hospital escribí las notas que siguen. Me llama mucho la atención las jerarquías dentro del hospital marcadas por uniformes de varios colores.

August 9, 2024

On Randomness

Iperborea is an italian publishing house founded by Emilia Lodigiani in 1987 which aims to bring to Italian readers the literature of northern Europe. Their books have a distinctive format and texture of their covers making them instantly recognizable while browsing in a bookstore. Not all of their titles are easy to find in English in Italy so they are a good way for me to connect to Scandinavian culture while also practicing my Italian.

July 19, 2024

Hamilton and the Discovery of Quaternions

Towards the end of my Ph.D. years at The Ohio State University together with a bunch of graduate students we thought of publishing our own magazine. We struggled to come up with a good name for it so after a lot of back and forth we settled on “The Empy Set”. The OSU graduate advisor found this too nihilistic and wanted us to pick a different name. We nevertheless wrote what inevitably ended up being the only issue of “The Empty Set” and circulated it among the department.

June 24, 2024

A Large Language Model in the 1700s?

I listened to a fascinating podcast in the “Past, Present, Future” series by David Runciman on the 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. Runciman gives an excellent summary of the various journeys that Gulliver undertakes in this book; journeys to far away lands were he encounters fantastic creatures and their world: tiny people, giants, talking horses, and the like. In one of these journeys Gulliver finds academics stubbornly determined to strip language of all ambiguity.

December 31, 2019

Figs

Let’s talk figs. There was a fig tree near the main house “Villa Isaura” in Carlos Paz, Cordoba where I spent many a holiday as a kid. I remember breaking off leaves to see and feel the white sticky substance that came out. It was a somewhat mysterious and out of the way tree, with strange gnarly branches and big dark green leaves, a huge contrast to the tall, straight and ubiquitous eucalyptus trees that lined up so many sidewalks of my Buenos Aires childhood.

October 4, 2019

From here to there

One of the odd perks of getting old is that one can look back to the distant past and wonder with cold detachment just who the hell we were. As a kid I was obsessed with cryptography and secret messages. I even halfheartedly tried to create a language that only my friends and I would understand. I wanted to build a robot. I also wanted to live in a desert island and made endless plans in my head on how I would run my life on it.

November 6, 2014

What I miss

Like a teenager keeping a journal I note in shame that my last post here is from 2012. Since then I have moved to Trieste, Italy, taking a job at the ICTP: Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Horculas en el migo. And so it is. Looking back, it is clear that growing up in Buenos Aires shaped my view of the world, what to expect from the day to day of life.

June 1, 2011

Taxi rides

I am not sure if it is an Austin phenomenon or not but I have had a few interesting taxi rides back and forth to the airport over the years. I’ll leave aside the late night taxi ride where the driver, a young woman, told a few off-color jokes (“you are not a prude man, are you?”); including one that I am pretty sure was popular when I was in primary school.

January 8, 2009

Back and short

I’ve lived in the US now for over 22 years. I have encountered two dollar bills exactly three times (I kept them all). The first time was around Harvard Square as change in a store. It was so strange. I’ve seen a few dollar coins too. Usually all of them at once unfortunately. At least 15 years ago, if you bought a NJ transit train ticket in a machine at the station and paid with a 20 dollar bill the change came clanking down in a stream of dollar coins.

July 25, 2007

Benasque

While I wait for my brain strings to settle after a long summer shuttling about I make a quick core dump before it’s all gone. I spent two weeks in Benasque, Spain for the workshop P-adic analysis, Periods and Physics . We ended up being a very small group of participants, unfortunate in a way but the result was a very charming workshop. And what a place! Benasque is in a valley in the Spanish Pyrenees not far from the border with France, a small mountain town where you walk everywhere, surrounded by amazing mountains full of unbelievably beautiful hikes.

June 15, 2007

Dancing Numbers

I can’t resist one last post before I go off into the webless wilderness of the Atlantic coast. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this blogging idea but I was more than taken aback by how fast the blog’s existence seems to have spread. It’s exciting. Over the years I’ve read articles about Twyla Tharp, the american dancer and coreographer. Somehow, I always found great affinity to her ideas. A few months ago, in a New York Times article, she described how she sometimes went for days without dealing with numbers (hid all the clocks in her house, for example) to give the intuitive side of her brain more prominence.