Julio Rey Pastor

• 1. Introduction

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  Julio Rey Pastor was born on the 14th of August 1888 in Spain, and by the time he died on the 21st of February 1962, he had spent a lifetime reshaping how mathematics was taught, practiced, and organized across two continents. He trained under some of the most formidable mathematical minds of the early twentieth century. He built research institutions from nothing. And he cultivated two parallel schools of mathematics, one in Spain and one in Argentina, that worked on the same problems from opposite sides of the Atlantic.

  How does a young graduate from Saragossa become the dominant figure in Spanish mathematics? What drove him to cross an ocean and start again? And what does it mean to build a scientific tradition in a country that, at the time, had none worth speaking of? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Saragossa and Berlin

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  Zoel García de Galdeano, professor of Analytical Geometry and Calculus at the University of Saragossa, was the man who first shaped Rey Pastor's mathematical instincts. The environment at Saragossa was stimulating enough to pull Rey Pastor away from his hometown, and he graduated with honors in 1908. The following year he earned his doctorate from Complutense University of Madrid, under the supervision of Eduardo Torroja Caballé.

  Between 1911 and 1914, Rey Pastor studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Göttingen. Felix Klein supervised his work there, and he also studied under Hermann Schwarz, Friedrich Hermann Schottky, and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius. Schwarz's lectures on analytic functions and synthetic geometry made a particular impression. In the formal report Rey Pastor sent back to Spain's Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, he praised Schwarz not only for the innovations in the material but for the teaching method itself. That report was not merely a formality. It became the blueprint for something Spain had never had.

• 3. Building a Laboratory

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  In 1915, the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios accepted Rey Pastor's proposal and created the Mathematics Laboratory and Seminar. That same year, the Junta created for him in Madrid the first mathematics research institute in Spain situated outside a university. The proposal had been simple in its language but ambitious in its intent: a seminar to arouse the research spirit of Spanish schoolchildren.

  The laboratory moved several times before finding a permanent home. It began in the basement of the National Library, shifted to a modest apartment on Santa Teresa Street, then moved to the building of the Center for Historical Studies. In 1939, having been absorbed into the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, it was renamed the Instituto Jorge Juan de Matemáticas. Rey Pastor's explicit aim had been to break the isolation and individualism that characterized Spanish mathematics at the time. The institution he founded became the mechanism for doing that, and in 1951 he was appointed its director.

• 4. The Argentine Chapter

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  From 1921, Rey Pastor settled permanently in Argentina, and his influence there grew to match what he had built in Spain. By the mid-1930s he was directing a substantial group of research students in Buenos Aires. He was instrumental in founding the Argentine Mathematical Union in 1936, and he directed its journal from 1936 to 1940.

  The transatlantic arrangement that developed was unusual. Rey Pastor maintained a continued interest in the mathematics life of Spain even while living in Buenos Aires, and the result was two schools on both sides of the Atlantic working on similar research projects. The parallel was not accidental. It reflected Rey Pastor's method: building institutions and training researchers rather than simply publishing his own results. He returned to Spain in 1956, and his final recorded visit was on the 21st of June 1961, when he attended the entry of his disciple Sixto Ríos into the Academy of Sciences.

• 5. Textbooks and the Royal Academy

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  Rey Pastor's writing reached audiences far beyond the seminar room. He authored a series of advanced mathematics textbooks that carried considerable influence across the Iberian world. His scientific output also included articles for the general public, and he worked as a historian of science with a specific interest in the history of mathematics in Spain.

  In 1954, he entered the Real Academia Española, proposed by Gregorio Marañón and Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón. His acceptance speech addressed the algebra of language. He had already been a member of the Academy of Sciences in Madrid since 1920 and of the Academy of Sciences in Buenos Aires since 1932. He occupied his seat in the Real Academia Española from 1953 to 1962. Among his later published works, a 1957 set of lecture notes on abstract set theory from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo drew a review from Alonzo Church in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1963.

• 6. Memorials and Legacy

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  Spain issued a postage stamp in Rey Pastor's honor in the year 2000. A street in Seville, the Calle Matematicos Rey Pastor y Castro, carries his name. Cartographers Hugh Percy Wilkins and Antonio Paluzie-Borrell named a lunar crater Faraday G after him, calling it Reypastor, though the International Astronomical Union did not adopt the designation.

  Rey Pastor's 1942 work on science and technology in the discovery of the Americas, published in Buenos Aires, shows how far his interests ranged beyond pure mathematics. His final co-authored work on Bessel functions appeared in Madrid in 1958, just four years before his death. The Instituto Jorge Juan de Matemáticas, which he had founded, directed, and returned to lead in 1951, stands as the most durable expression of the institution-building project he began with a single report sent home from Germany.