Biography.

I am a PHd student at the mathematics department of the university of California Santa Cruz.

My interest in being part of inclusive learning started when I was very young. I volunteered for three years in literacy programs (Campaña de alfabetizacion Cemac-Logos-C.I.E, Alfabetiza ) for impoverished indigenous communities where grown-ups had not been able to learn to read and do basic arithmetic. At that time, I realized the colossal inequality gap in Mexico, the importance of education for the country's future, and how the lack of this condemns many people to poverty. Also, I began to believe that mathematical talent is distributed equally among different groups, regardless of geography, demography, and economy.

I met an unfortunate side of my country, but I also met the strength of human solidarity and mathematics’ power to serve the needs of different communities. I committed to giving people tools to improve their quality of life and decided to pursue a scientific care. These literacy programs showed me that every student deserves to be treated with dignity.

The literacy programs were split into the pre-program and the actual program. The first was during the scholar year; the main goal was to have pedagogy training and prepare the supplies for the program. Since we were working with isolated communities, it was necessary to bring all the teaching, food, and medical supplies. The training used the approach of Paulo Freiere, especially his books; Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Literacy: Reading the Word & the World. He describes and criticizes the “banking model” in the first two books, where the teacher is a jar full of knowledge, and the student is an empty glass. Then the professor as jar pours the knowledge into the blank student. This process is vertical uni-directional: there is a hierarchy of “the professor, who knows all the answers,” and “the student, whose only duty is to contain.” In his last book, he proposes a method to break the "banking model" with a new concept called “the cultural circle,” he recognized that his literacy program has the risk of becoming into the imposision ot the urban wester culture of the big cities of brazil over the rural culture; in my case, I was a high school student living in Mexico City, working with Otomi indigenous communities from the rural areas of Queretaro state.

The primary purpose of the cultural circle is to demystify the idea that there is a better or superior culture. The idea is to use “the generating word” to inspire a conversation about an issue or object that evidence that both cultures can see the same object differently. The dialago between two different ways of think can shows that difference is complimentary, and diversity becomes synergy. For example, the generating word is cow, for me like an urban person, the word cow makes me thinking in the price of a milk bottle in a supermarket. In contrast, the rural person may think about the farimg process of the animal. With these two perspectives, we can debate how accesible the milk bottle price and how fair is the payment in the rural areas; the first concerns urban life, and the second the rural life. We see that both sides can have benefits from the interchange of ideas.

The concept of the generating word is summarized in the title, Literacy: Reading the Word & the World, since the generating word is a way to read the world dialectically. The cultural circle is one of the many guideposts in my own personal compass. I sincerely believe in the importance of diversity. As a mathematician, I have never been in a situation where the addition of perspective has subtracted from understanding. And I believe this concept holds in general, especially if one is listening.

Degrees.

Bachelors' degree thesis " Teoria de Hodge en variedades reales y complejas " advised by Oscar Palmas Garcia-Narajo (the Hodge Theory in real and complex manifolds). It is an introduction to Hodge Theory for undergraduate mathematics students. This thesis received special recognition from the jury at the Sotero Prieto Award from the Mexican Mathematics Society to the best bachelor's degree thesis in 2014. Oficial title and transcript.

Master's degree thesis " La dinamica de un vehiculo articulado de n-trailers " advised by Luis Garcia-Narajo. Oficial title and transcript.

Ph.D. degree thesis " Metric lines in metbelian Carnot groups '', under the advice of Richard Montgomery. Oficial title .

Alberto Barajas Celis.

El doctor Alberto Barajas Celis fue uno de los precursores del las matematias en Mexico, el principal auditoria de la Facultad de Ciencias tiene su nombre, las presentes y futuras generaciones de matematicos mexicanos, somos el fruto de la semilla que el Doctor Barajas sembro.

Durante el homenaje al doctor Barajas en el 2013-XLVI Congreso Nacional Sociedad Matemática Mexicana, Merida, México, el doctor Rafael Perez Pascual. conto la siguiente historia de unas voces que le hablan al Doctor Barajas cuando era estudiante de preparatoria en San Idelfonso.

"No hay sino anhelos, Barajas. Lo demás no existe. Por lo menos no existe vitalmente. La realidad de que habla la ciencia es una realidad pensada. Realidad solamente la tienen las cosas cuando en ellas se prende nuestro deseo o nuestra nostalgia. La India ha sabido esto mejor que nadie; por eso Buda hace de la sed la sustancia del mundo. Nos hacemos la ilusión de que somos mercaderes, pero nuestra caravana salió al desierto sólo para sentir sed. Sed de vivir, sed de conocer, sed de morir".