While at the UAB/BGSMath, 26-year old French national Laurent Cantier is working on C*-algebras for his PhD. But when weekend comes, among his passion is the slackline. El Periódico de Catalunya met him for its “common people” section.

The El Periódico de Catalunya featured PhD student Laurent Cantier in its “common people” section. In December, he broke the Spanish record of the longest slackline (500 metres).

This balancing sport, performed by a small number of enthusiasts in the world, has much in common with another one of Laurent’s passions: C*-algebras, a field introduced 50 years ago with quantum mechanics. Happy with “a pen and a paper”, as he says, he enjoys the “mental game” of trying to demonstrate something abstract. “Once you demonstrate something in math, no one will ever be able to question it again: it is true forever.”

“The path for learning is the same in slacklining, in maths and in life,” he explains. “It is, in a way, a form of growing.”

Read the entire interview (in Spanish) here.

Meet the BGSMath PhD student community here.

The article that appeared today in El Periódico

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