About this Blog

In this space you will find articles that I have been writing since 2017, covering a range of topics I am passionate about.

1. Elections: I’m not particularly interested in specific elections but rather on their general properties when analyzing them as a form of social technology. I am very critical of elections, and I think their many shortcomings are a serious roadblock in the construction of real democracies.

2. Markets: I am interested in dissecting markets as the most prevalent way of allocating resources in our societies, and comparing them to alternatives as central planning. (This is a series of entries that I will launch in October 2020).

3. Climate Change: My entries about climate change seek to clarify my own understanding of the most pressing global crisis that affects us all. I am particularly keen on going deeper into the technical aspects of both the problem and the potential solutions. 

4. Violence: The ridiculously high levels of violence in Colombia are the biggest, most dramatic problem of this country.  However, for some strange reason, Colombians tend to forget that. I write about this topic with a heavy emphasis on the numbers and statistics, which I believe are crucial to understanding the complexity of this phenomenon.

5. Poverty: This blog started in the summer of 2017 when I spent a month in Uganda working in a Microfinance project. My goal was to write about this topic as a way of learning as much as I could about it. Although I have not written about this for a while, it is one that I want to go back and explore further.

6. Knowledge: Other than reading the occasional book on the topic, I have never studied Philosophy, so anything that I write about it is surely naive and incomplete. Still, like anyone else, I find myself questioning my own thoughts and sense of reality, and I use this space to reflect on it.

7. Maths: I like to write about the stories surrounding my favourite areas and results in Mathematics. I am fascinated by the people behind the ideas, and the way in which the theories were developed. Explanations for a general audience of the more technical bits will come soon. 

8. Space Exploration: I cannot think of a more exciting adventure in the coming decades than the exploration of space, and our quest to understand the cosmos. I want to be as informed as I can about these efforts, and I want to share what I learn about them.

9. Observations: Finally,  personal experiences, views on current topics, and recommendations. This is where I put anything that doesn’t fit any of the previous categories!

My entries are typically two thousand words long, which means they usually take 10-15 minutes to read. Since the migration of the blog to a new site in September 2020, I have the resolution of publishing every other Sunday.

About the languages

Although I am a native Spanish speaker, I write most of the entries in English and then use Google Translate to translate them into Spanish. The automatic translations from English to Spanish produced by Google are of very high quality and it usually takes me less than 15 minutes to polish them.

I have found that this way of doing things is more efficient than the other way around: I am afraid that whenever the original text is in Spanish, poor Google gets very confused with the peculiar ways I expressing myself in my mother tongue, and the texts it produces in English are weird and difficult to edit.

You will find at the top of some entries a message warning you if it is an automatic translation that hasn’t been properly edited. Please, bear with me for a few months; I hope the whole site is fully in both languages before 2020 is over.

About myself

I was born in Bogota, Colombia, where I lived for 25 years. I did my undergrad studies in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at Los Andes University. I moved to The Netherlands and did an MSc in Applied Mathematics at Utrecht University, and then to the United Kingdom, where I did a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Oxford University. In 2011 I relocated to London, where I have been working in various quantitative roles in fixed-income and equity markets for a financial firm.

Contacting me

One of the intentions of this blog is to create a space where I can have a conversation with friends and strangers about any of the topics I write about. I would love to hear from you, either if it’s a comment after a post, or message through my social media channels.

In a few weeks, I will enable a mailing list that you can subscribe to if you would like to receive notifications of new posts.

Comments, criticisms, or suggestions on how to improve this site: They all are welcome.