The streets and the numbers of Cuernavaca

I usually use this blog to post about stuff I have written or that is somehow related to my work / professional life. This time, however, I'll just use it to share with you a short text my father published in the column he writes in the La Unión de Morelos newspaper, Academia de Ciencias de Morelos: La Ciencia, desde Morelos para el mundo.

My father has lived for over 20 years in Cuernavaca, la Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera (the city of the eternal Springtime), ~80Km south of Mexico City. Cuernavaca was for long years known mostly as a weekend city for Mexico City's middle-upper class, but it has grown way beyond that. According to Wikipedia, in Cuernavaca's metropolitan area there are about 700,000 inhabitants. And the city is blatantly built with no planning, no urbanistic analysis of any kind.

I have been familiar for many years with the program to put some rational order renumber Cuernavaca's streets. Roberto Tamariz, the sociologist who built my father's house (yes, in a stroke of genius he acted as an architect for a piece of land he had bought - the results are quite decent, given his real occupation, but his lack of architectural background tends to literally come up from the floor every now and then), was involved in a municipal project to renumber Cuernavaca's streets, probably some 15 years ago.

Anyway, Roberto's work was never really finished due to the severe lackings of our political culture. In this (one-and-a-third pages long, quite easy to read) text I am attaching to this post, my father writes about Cuernavaca's strange street naming system, the mathematical solutions (and political intrincacies) about renumbering a two dimensional space (and, of course, he could not help but wander into the third- and fourth-dimentional spaces, although very briefly).

I like how this guy writes, all in all. Enjoy!