A translation of an article about my work in Spanish newspaper La Razon. You can read the original article here.
Mathematics was, as for so many classmates with little numerical capacity, the coconut of my adolescence. In a twisting mortal with pedagogy, my teacher came to suspend me with a 4.9. I always stayed 0.1 to understand algebra and today I can’t survive without a calculator. I am not proud. I wonder if everything would have gone better with Tom Crawford. This Brit is a professor at Oxford, but he doesn’t wear a herringbone jacket or bottle-butt glasses nor is he older than the polka. Tom is an AC / DC math, the punk kid in the bunch. Unlike the old masters, he does not use the ruler as a throwing weapon but, at most, to measure the meters of cloth that is removed from each lesson. He is a “naked scientist”, not as a nod to precariousness but as a seduction pedagogical strategy. “I want to take the solemnity off the math, make it entertaining,” he says.
That goes through a “look” of a hangover rocker with a given shirt, sucks, piercing, tattoos and hair dye. He calls himself “Tom Rocks Maths.” His profiles on networks and his informative videos, in which he ends up posing in leopard-print briefs, have legions of followers. Will it be the solution to my problems? Be that as it may, Crawford was in Madrid yesterday, for the first time in Spain, to give a talk in his own way about mathematics applied to sport. The event took place at the Student Residence, where in 1923 another weird boy, with more clothes and more hair, Einstein, summed up his theory of relativity in an act presented and translated by Ortega and Gaset. The list of visits to that leading institution is as interesting as that of its well-known students: Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel …
The Residence has long become part of a memorial of what it was, but its teaching program continues far from the spotlight, without neglecting the field of science, which seems to have been overlapped when speaking of the Residence due to talent. creative of the boys of Letters already mentioned. Tom Crawford is the last visit and, although we may feel like a histrion or a secondary actor in “Trainspotting”, we must not forget that this is purely an eminence from Oxford.
Photo: Jesus G. Feria
