ezequiel-garzon.net/1
Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry came out in 1997, and one phrase from that film stuck with me all these years: "tradition is the illusion of permanence". I feel the same could be said about publishing thoughts with your real name. It is both daunting and haunting to reflect on the fact that back then I was already thinking about putting up a personal website, but never did. So here I go, roughly three decades on...
I don't have much of a digital life.
In particular, I never got social networks.
Still, I figured if I'm doing this, I might as well include some relevant keywords in the opening post, in case somebody from a shared past tries to look for me online.
If you want to contact me, use mail@ with this domain.
I was born on May 21, 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bernasconi (1989), Carlos Pellegrini (1994), Norwalk Community-Technical College (1997), SUNY Stony Brook (2000), Washington University in St. Louis (2002): there's a savage, incomplete yet keyword-rich summary of my education. During my decade in the US, I lazily defaulted to my otherwise unused first name, Martin, which I've come to mildly regret. In 2004 my then wife and I moved to Spain, where we welcomed two wonderful daughters, Ariana and Lara. They often advise me not to overthink things. The fact that I am, at long last, finally posting something is, to no small extent, heeding their invaluable young wisdom.
Here is the first of the two main sources of bikeshedding regarding this site. arXiv is a massive e-print repository that was launched in 1991, days after the first website ever was published. I doubt I knew about it by the time I watched Deconstructing Harry, but as a math major I must have learned about it around that time. One aspect that caught my attention was the fact that the articles with just one version had "v1" appended. Logically, it made sense, even though applying this principle, say, to books, would feel odd, as a book with only one edition would read "first edition". Submitted versions cannot be changed. Moreover, arXiv also disallows as a general principle (as far as I know, barring a judge's order) eliminating a submission: in case a retraction is needed, the author must issue a new version that withdraws the paper. All this philosophy resonated with me, but since I'm most likely to post overwhelmingly entries with only one version, I decided to avoid having to fill my home page and posts with "v1" tags. However, some of the arXiv influence has remained: I won't modify published text. In case I feel an update is truly called for, I will append new text with the corresponding date. Therefore, whatever mistakes I make, be they logical, grammatical or otherwise, will remain on the record with all their glory.
The second bikeshedding point was what format or, more broadly, what technology I would use to create my posts. This site is written in plain HTML or, to be more precise, almost plain... more on this in my next post. I almost went with (shockingly, again plain) TeX, maybe due to another illusion, that of reaching maximal trustworthiness. More seriously, not enough math writing was planned to justify choosing a typesetting system over the native language of the web. In any event, I'm glad this major ordeal in analysis paralysis is now over... look what happened to the apocryphal donkey!