Jesús Reyes Corona

I met Jesús in 1971 at the Physics Department at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV). I took an Electrodynamics class from him. He taught the class using the Berkeley Physics Course in Electricity and Magnetism by the Nobel Prize winner, Edward M. Purcell, from Taylorville Illinois. That was a great class. It helped that I had used the book before in my introduction to Electricity and Magnetism at Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica, with Professor Arturo Nava Jaimes, now the General Coordinator of Technological Universities in Mexico.

Jesús was elegant and intelligent. He was young and married around the time I met him, from 1971 to 1973. I met his son Leonardo before I went to Santa Barbara in 1973.

Later in life I met him again at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (UAP), where he had started theoretical physics work in the late seventies. Carlos Cambero, Rafael Baquero, and him, were the strong influx of talent and energy that started a new life in this, one of the oldest institutions in Theoretical Physics in Mexico.

They started the Instituto de Fisica and I was hired by the Escuela de Física. The idea was that "good" people had to to go to the Institute eventually. I was in talks with Jesús to move to the Institute, when he unexpectedly died in a plane crash near Los Angeles in the late eighties. I stayed at the Escuela, which eventually was upgraded to Facultad.

Nowadays I am proud to report that the Facultad has received one million dollars for ten years of experimental work at the European Center of High Energy Physics starting last summer.

The Centre Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, now hosts UAP students to work toward their Philosophy Doctor degrees in Physics.

We have come a long way Jesús; I miss you.