Today's guest is Federico Ardilla.

You might recognize Federico from our number file videos.

He wears his trademark baseball cap, and he often incorporates soccer anecdotes into his mathematics.

Federico is a combinatorist at San Francisco State University.

He's Colombian, and in this episode he talks candidly about the struggles and prejudice

encountered by people from different backgrounds as they try to make their mark in academia.

It's not always easy to hear, but it's important stuff. And just so you know,

there's a happy ending insight, this episode of the podcast will conclude with a stirring musical finale.

That's definitely a first for the number file podcast.

Yeah, so I was born in Bogota.

My family is from a bunch of little towns in the state of Santander, which is close to Venezuela.

And yeah, they were from all those little towns and migrated into the city of Bucaramanga.

And then eventually both of my parents ended up in Bogota. So that's where I was born. What did your parents do? My mom did a lot of things, so I'll go second, because that's a longer one. My dad was trained as a civil engineer. So he did kind of hydrology and things like this. So he did that kind of thing. But he eventually got more excited about just people. And he ended up just working in companies just kind of thinking about how people work together and thinking

about teams and these kinds of things. So he did a lot of the kinds of things. Like sort of

HR type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then my mom did everything. So she was trained as a sociologist.

She was actually part of the first generation of sociologists in Colombia when that was a new department.

And it was actually considered two radicals.

So it got shut down very quickly.

So she got to graduate.

And then there were no sociologists again for a little while.

So her training was in sociology.

And then she just did all kinds of

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