I am a musician, mathematician and computer scientist from Mexico living in Paris, France. In 2022, I seriously considered the possibility of having Arperger’s syndrome, although I suspected I had it many years before. Asperger’s will simply and completely explain all my out-of-the-ordinary behaviors that have characterized me since my childhood.
All my life I had a facility for mathematics and music. The first experiences were before going to school when my siblings were already in kindergarten and elementary school. In the mornings my mom would put me in front of the television to watch Sesame Street where I started learning to read and count when I was 4. When I entered elementary school at the age of 5, my mom told me that I was the only child who started the day happy to enter (as opposed to all the other children who cried because they were separated from their moms) and who came out crying (as opposed to all the children who were happy to go home). What my mom told me is that I was crying because I already knew what they were going to teach me. The rest of my basic education was like that, I was bored and oriented my attention to other things, I always had the best notes in exams, but I almost never finished my homework.
When I was 6 years old, my father took my brother and me to one of his friends who had an orchestra and who began to teach me how to play. who started teaching me to play percussions, especially congas. My dad dreamed of to learn to play the tarolas or timbal cubano and his idea was that we would play together someday. (I don’t remember if my dad encouraged my brother to play). That was my first contact with music. At the age of 12 I started to play the guitar and a little bit of piano in high school (college in France). At 13 I started playing with a variety group and received my first salary as a conguero. Before the age of 15, I started to study drums at the Instituto de Capacitación Musical of the SUTM. At that time I was at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria campus #5 of the UNAM, but me and my classemates spent most of our time playing guitar and chatting between us. In general I studied only a few days before exams and always got very good notes. It was during high school that I participated in the first Mexican Mathematical Olympiad (OMM). Although I passed the first stage, I was disqualified because the winning team of the OMM would be prepared to participate in the international Olympiad at Sydney, Australia the following year. Despite our demands to finish the OMM and not to participate in the international one, the members of the jury argued that it was impossible because they were going to spend time preparing the participants. In fact, the rules of the competition were incomplet since I fullfilled the age condition and my inscription in high school, but nothing was wrote in the rules about the inscription in high school the following year. Finally, a series of letters to official instances closed me the doors of the mathematical circle in Mexico.
During high school (lycée in France), Rodolfo Neri Vela the first Mexican cosmonaut made his first flight. He did his studies in mechanical-electrical engineering at the Facultad de Ingeniería of the UNAM. At the time I wanted to be an astronaut and I entered the Facultad de Ingeniería in mechanical-electrical engineering, but I quickly got bored. When I asked my professors why we used certain formulas or theories, they would answer: “because that’s the way it is in the book”. Oh disappointment! It was my professor of Differential and Integral Calculus who told me: “You are at the wrong school, you should be in front because you have a scientific spirit. Here is an engineering school.” (The Facultad de Ciencias is located in front of the classrooms of calculus courses in engineering, just crossing the avenue called the “inner loop”.) The following year, I entered the Facultad de Ciencias where I started Mathematics oriented on Computer Science and at the same time at the Taller de Jazz of the Escuela Superior de Música of the INBA (currently INBAL). My mathematical and programming skills were quickly appreciated by my teachers and classmates. At that time I was accompanying a Mexican artist and singer and did not regularly attend courses. Since my income came from music, I chose the school of music over the school of science. Several years later I returned to the Facultad de Sciencias and had a first contract as a programmer of mathematical animations at the Institute de Matemáticas of the UNAM.
The following year I had a position as an academic technician as an assistant at the Computer Center of the Facultad de Ciencias and a few months later, the opportunity to go to Cornell University, for a summer of science. My profile as a mathematician and programmer began to solidify. In my position as academic technician, my responsibility was the installation of workstations in the computer rooms with linux. Linux and dual Linux-Windows systems. Gradually I had more responsibilities, trainer responsibilities, server administrator, technical support, user support, teaching assistant and consultant. My computer skills made me an expert and I worked on several important projects in the private sector.
After a staggered undergraduate studies, I obtained my degree in Mathematics on February 27th, 2003 with a research dissertation in visualization and differential geometry (minimal surfaces and elliptic functions). That work was presented at the International Congress of Differential Geometry in Bilbao, Spain in September 2000. Just a few days before the birth of my only daughter.
In 2003 I obtained a position as a server administrator at the Instituto de Astronomía and a course as a lecturer at the Facultad de Ciencias of the UNAM. In 2004 I started my graduate studies at the Ciencias Básicas e Ingeniería](https://cbi.izt.uam.mx) unit of the UAM Iztapalapa. My doctoral research work was a celestial mechanics topic and on January 13, 2010 I defended my dissertation work. Officially that day I officially obtained my PhD in mathematics and celestial mechanics.
In 2010 I started a postdoctoral research work with Jacques Laskar at Institut de Mécanique Céléste et Calcul des Éphémérides of the Observatoire de Paris. The research consisted of the parallelization in time of symplectic integrators to accelerate the calculation of long-term Solar System solutions using graphics cards (GPUs). Funding was provided by the Agence National de la Recherche as part of a multidisciplinary project called An astronomical time scale for the Mesozoic era to determine in a very precise way the different glaciations of our planet.
Between 2012 and 2013 I worked at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, as a member of the core team of the Planck collaboration. My work consisted of various tasks in the computational astrophysics team. computational astrophysics team. Among them, I was in charge of the satellite infrastructure, participated in the development of the new simulation and data validation tool, and participated in the development of the new simulation and data validation tool and general administration tasks of the database, the wiki of both HFI and LFI instruments, among others. During this period, I learned several techniques of statistical mechanics and in particular Bayesian statistics applications used in simulations for the qualitative study of the the Cosmological Microwave Background or CMB. The CMB corresponds to very small variations of temperature (of the order of a millionth of a degree Celsius) that correspond to the last detectable residues of the Big-Bang.
Between 2013 and 2019 I did a postdoc at the. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, as a member of the seismology team. Funds were provided by the Collège de France under the direction of Barbara Romanowicz. At the same time, I taught mathematics courses at the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires (CRI) of the _Université Paris V Decartes], nowadays Learning Planet Institute (LPI), Université Paris Cité. My postdoctoral reasearch consisted in investigating new techniques of numerical integration in the time variable for the simulation of seismic waves in the earth. The main objectives are to control the dispersion and attenuation of seismic waves with new multi-wave integration methods. new methods of multi-symplectic integration combining finite element spectral spectral theory in finite elements (SEM or Spectral Element Method). The first part of the project allowed us to understand the geometry of symplectic integration in the in the case of autonomous Hamiltonian systems. I realized that the original objective was very ambitious and I focused on comprehensively understanding the results we had already found. During that time I participated in the validation and verification of the global tomography method of Barbara Romanowicz, for building a tomographic model of the earth from a non-spherically symmetric model and verifying that the method converges to equivalent results.
Currently, I am part of the computational service of the Astroparticle and Cosmology (APC) laboratory, which is a joint research unit (MRU) of the CNRS and Paris Cité University, with participation of CEA and CNES. I am technically responsible for one of the data processing systems of the ECLAIRs instrument of the SVOM satellite. This instrument is a coded mask telescope that detects high-energy sources in the X-ray and gamma-ray ranges. In particular in the 4-150 KeV range. In addition, I am a member of the QC2I quantum computation team and the TEAMLab project manager network, both at the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics IN2P3 of the CNRS.