Fighting isolation: the mathematician Norberto Cuesta Dutari

Abstract

This presentation describes the struggle against isolation of Norberto Cuesta Dutari (1907-1989) under the Franco regime. Though he was not close to the establishment and could not profit from a number of opportunities for personal and institutional promotion, he achieved a mathematical production of international quality. His creative papers –dating back to 1943– are still cited in fields like Descriptive Set Theory or Decision Theory. His contribution to pure Mathematics was gathered in the book Matemática del Orden (1958), a common bibliography item of Set Theory.

The isolation of Cuesta in places like Ávila, Segovia, and Salamanca was for him a lifelong concern, and not only a matter of geographical distances. He often firmly complained about it, but it is difficult to imagine his vital trajectory anywhere else. After his doctorate in 1943 he tried several times to become a University Professor, but only in 1957 could he obtain a chair in Salamanca. He was fifty, lagging some twenty years behind the Civil War generation: Pedro Abellanas (b. 1914) and Francisco Botella (b. 1915), obtained chairs in their late twenties just after it.

Cuesta promoted the Mathematics degree in Salamanca, started in 1971: Even then, isolation won that battle, but the beauty of his Mathematics still remain