Biographical Journey

• I was born in Bogotá (Colombia), a huge city (8~ millions!) surrounded by mountains in the middle of the Andes.
• I lived for eight years in Lorica (Cordoba) a small, peaceful, warm and poor town in colombian caribean coast. There's not website about Lorica! I'll have to create one.
• I did my undergrad in mathematics in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
• I graduated in 05/2001 and in 07/2001 I came to Urbana, IL, a small and peaceful university town in the midwest, to pursue my graduate studies in mathematics. Since then I'm here studying and working.
• Although I'd prefer a call or an e-mail, if you wanna know how I am doing, perhaps checking the bluelephant ballad can give you an idea of my current state of mind.
• Here in U-C, I'm a humble member of the Colombian Students Association and the Colombian Go Players Association.
• I write movie reviews for Ocho y medio and book reviews and literature-related articles for Pie de Página.
• My sister, Liliana, who is now in Barcelona, has a documentary producing team. This is their website.
• I'm trying to make a list of colombian mathematicians working or studying abroad. Please check it out and let me know if I'm missing somebody.
• When I'm home sick, I read El Tiempo, Cambio or (don't laugh at me) Soho. When I'm just interested in news, I read The Guardian or New York Times.

Photographical Journey

• Some that I have in Yahoo from a trip to Chicago.
• In Boston during the Boston Greatest Logic Conference 2003.
• In Colombia during my trip from Dec 2002 to Jan 2003.

Sociopathic Journey

• My cousin Sergio studies Software Architecture in Grenoble, France, and is happily almost-married with Andréa Amórtegui (who is also in Grenoble! Finally! :)).
• My younger cousin Gabriel is finishing his undergrad in Physics in the Nacional.
• One of the visible leaders of the free software movement in Colombia and a great friend: Alejo Forero.
• A highly computationally skilled biologist and the brain behind Conelprofe.com, Fidel Ramirez.
• A computer scientist specialist in history and dead languages, Juan Camilo Latorre.
• A great professor, mathematician and friend, Andrés Villaveces. He is the person responsible of my interest for logic and model theory. So, if you have any concern about it, he is the one to blame. :)
• Dancing, weather, data-mining and friendship. That's Francina Dominguez to me. An awesome woman who I admire so much.
• I met this fan of heavy/dark/speed metal almost by mistake during my second year in college. Since then we've been good friends (although we've had a couple of differences). Let me introduce you to José Velez, a mathematician studying his masters in Puerto Rico.
• My favorite statistician, Santiago Velasco, plays chess, likes pattern recognition through statistical analysis and studies his masters in Puerto Rico with José.
• A great friend, a nice go player and an excellent person. He is Juan Antonio Saenz, a turbulent guy who likes water, books and turbulences (perhaps trying to understand himself).
• An extremely creative (although sometimes amusingly utopian) mathematician interested in philosophy, books, movies and failed encounters. My favorite editor and boss. This is Alejandro Martín.
• A good friend I've came to meet through the blogging scene. The Nietzsche-geek and Sabato worshipper, Miguel Gualdrón enjoys watching the rain fall against the window.
• My roomate and good friend, Hernando Tellez. He likes ultimate frisbee, ultraproducts, analysis and activism.
• Our friendship was born from an innocent e-mail almost a year ago and magically we managed to meet in Madrid for a few hours in january 2004. My dearest Mercedes Paz speaks agentinian, makes dictionaries, writes beautifully, bakes lemon pies, misses Renata and Q and reads a lot.
• My academic sister,the disciplined Dominika Polkowska, likes to bake nice cakes, working out in the gym, swimming and working on highly abstract model theoretical contexts.
• The smartest kid on the block, Joe Mileti, likes volleyball, warcraft, horribly detailed construction arguments, set theory and recursion theory (although he is also proeficient in almost any other basic mathematical area).
• My algebraic geometry buddy, great friend and lovely person, Jen Paulhus. This guy Mileti up here happens to be her S.O.
• If people were measured by their spectrum of interests, Pedro Poitevin would be huge. He is a mathematician with a degree in biochemistry, interested on model theory of functional analysis, genetics, philosophy, politics and literature. A nice guy!
• My social weblogging club. Two lists, only one group: The Evil List and The Open List.

Mathematical Journey

• When I want to buy a math book, I go to amazon
• When I need a preprint, I take a look in the arXive or in math.LO if I'm looking for something specific in logic.
• This is the math department of my undergrad university,
• I helped to design an earlier version of the website of the Bogotá Logic Group. I hope one day I can go back to Bogotá and be active member of it..
• Right now I study in this math department and I belong to its Logic Group
• Professor Ash's Algebra Book is nice, complete and free.
• ASL Online: Association for Symbolic Logic.

Literary Journey

• Julio Cortazar: " Allá al fondo está la muerte, pero no tenga miedo. Sujete el reloj con una mano, tome con dos dedos la llave de la cuerda, remóntela suavemente. Ahora se abre otro plazo, los árboles despliegan sus hojas, las barcas corren regatas, el tiempo como un abanico se va llenando de sí mismo y de él brotan el aire, las brisas de la tierra, la sombra de una mujer, el perfume del pan."
• Roberto Bolaño: "Luego la Crítica muere otra vez y los Lectores mueren otra vez y sobre esa huella de huesos sigue la Obra su viaje hacia la soledad. Acercarse a ella, navegar en su estela es señal inequívoca de muerte segura, pero otra Crítica y otros Lectores se le acercan incansables e implacables y el tiempo y la velocidad los devoran. Finalmente la Obra viaja irremediablemente sola en la Inmensidad. Y un día la Obra muere, como mueren todas las cosas, como se extinguirá el Sol y la Tierra, el Sistema Solar y la Galaxia y la más recóndita memoria de los hombres. Todo lo que empieza como comedia acaba como tragedia."
• Jorge Luis Borges: "Yo he procurado rescatar del olvido un horror subalterno: la vasta Biblioteca contradictoria, cuyos desiertos verticales de libros corren el encesante albur de cambiarse en otros y que todo lo afirman, lo niegan y lo confunden como una divinidad que delira."
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "Muchos años despues, frente al peloton de fusilamiento, el Coronel Aureliano Buendia recordaria aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevo a conocer el hielo..."
• Indalecio Dias: "Nothing happens in life, everything is renewed every day, week, year, decade... The infinite nested cycles makes us feel that something is happening because each period is distinct. The illusion of life, then, is provided by the existence of infinite recurrent cycles. "Only when you are leaving, you can see the cycles waving and controlling.", says Anna just a few minutes before her death."
• José Saramago: " La culpa es un lobo que se come al hijo después de haber devorado al padre, dijo el escriba, Ese lobo del que hablas ya se ha comido a mi padre, dijo Jesús, Entonces sólo falta que devore a ti, Y tú, en tu vida, fuiste comido, o devorado, No sólo comido y devorado, también vomitado, respondió el escriba."
• Stanislav Lem: "I only came to understand this there. Because mathematics stands above everything. The works of Abel and Kronecker are as good today as they were four hundred years ago, and it will always be so. New roads arise, but the old ones lead on. They do not become overgrown. There...there you have eternity."
• Umberto Eco: "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
• Ernesto Sábato: "Muy pocos corren a prosternarse, en cambio, ante Tolstoi o Stendhal. Leemos una página de Rojo y Negro y tenemos la curiosa creencia de que cualquiera de nosotros sería capaz de escribir algo parecido; pero tropezamos con una frase como "el tensor G es nulo" y nos ponemos a temblar de pavor y sentimiento de inferioridad."