My Affair With History

Mexicans call Cuernavaca “the place of permanent spring.” In the Tepozteco Valley, where the city rests, the mornings are clear, the afternoons turn hazy and the evenings are blessed with a tropical rain.

I spent a week in September 1994 a few miles from the city, in the hacienda-style resort of Cocoyoc. The place would have resembled the Garden of Eden, were it not for Popocatépetl, which—though too far away to pose an imminent threat—loomed in the distance, rings of smoke hanging above its icy cone. A conference there had brought together mathematicians from three continents. All week we had listened to lectures, solved problems, discussed ideas and learned new techniques to keep up with the growth of our field.

On the last day of the conference, I was having lunch with fellow mathematicians Tudor Ratiu and Ernesto Pérez-Chavela. Like me, Tudor had been born and raised in Romania. Nine years my senior, he now taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Ernesto, a young professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City, was a co-organizer of the Cocoyoc meeting.

During lunch, Ernesto told us the story of Cocoyoc. In the local dialect cocoyoc means coyote, an animal often seen in the area centuries ago. The resort, endowed with swimming pools, tennis courts and a golf course, had once been a hacienda and apparently had been founded almost five centuries ago by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. Ernesto’s account of Cocoyoc’s origin sounded like a legend. It might have been true, but it made us wonder about how much fiction finds its way into the history books.

“It’s a fascinating subject,” Tudor said. “It reminds me of a Russian colleague, Anatoli Fomenko, who thinks that a lot of the ‘historical record’ is fiction.