In the quest for truth and meaning, mathematics Ph.D. student Luis Suarez found an unexpected path at UMD.

Luis Suarez has a soft spot for the classics. He loves philosophy but won’t read past the 19th century. He enjoys literature but prefers the likes of Goethe, Brontë and Dante (Alighieri of “The Divine Comedy,” that is) over King and Koontz. 

He has studied German, Latin and Greek and even translated an ancient text written by Gorgias, a pre-Socratic philosopher, into Spanish. 

So when Suarez became a mathematics Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland in 2019, he naturally gravitated to logic, a field that blends his two passions, philosophy and math. 

What he didn’t anticipate is that he’d also be creating a model to study the complex interplay between predators and prey in the animal kingdom.

“Before that, I was a pure mathematician,” Suarez said. “To me, a computer was just a thing that you type on.”

At UMD, Suarez found a home for his old interests—plus some new ones. He is studying functional analysis and descriptive set theory with Mathematics Professor Christian Rosendal as well as mathematical biology with Mathematics Professors Doron Levy and Maria Cameron.

Simultaneously studying pure and applied math is no issue for someone like Suarez, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in both philosophy and math. In fact, finding meaning and logic in unexpected places is Suarez’s specialty. 

“I have been working on completely disjointed things for almost 15 years. It's something that's a part of me, and I think it’s a skill that I shouldn’t lose,” Suarez said. “It not only helps in terms of making your CV look better, but it also helps you change perspectives in a very radical way.”

Finding his path

Suarez discovered philosophy by way of literature and math by way of physics. A lover of classic literature, Suarez has read “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë at least once a year since his high school graduation 15 years ago. He has read it in both English and Spanish, squeezing out new meaning each time.
His search for deeper understanding ultimately attracted him to philosophy and, later, mathematics. Reading Plato’s “The Symposium” in high school was Suarez’s entry point, but he later developed an affinity for the German idealists, particularly Kant and Hegel. 

At the same time, Suarez was exploring physics, a subject he planned to pursue in college until reality set in.

“My experimental skills were dreadful,” Suarez joked, adding that he began to explore the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics instead. That path introduced him to mathematical analysis, and he never looked back.

“I really fell in love with analysis,” Suarez said. “It's just beautiful when you start to understand it.”

Suarez earned his bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia, where he is from. He then completed a master’s program in mathematics and philosophy at the same university, this time applying Kant's transcendental logic to quantum and Lagrangian mechanics.

For Suarez, math and philosophy are two sides of the same coin, with both fields following a set of rules in search of universal truths.

“Mathematics and philosophy, I believe, proceed in the same way,” he said. “We have a set of hypotheses or a set of axioms, and we start to deduce things from those axioms.”

Worth the wait

What initially attracted Suarez to UMD for his Ph.D. was the Department of Mathematics’ “strong logic program,” but these days he’s most impressed by the flexibility.

“Something that I think is very valuable about UMD is that we have three Ph.D. programs in math, but you can work with any professor in any program,” Suarez said. “Having Doron [Levy] as my advisor helped me to grow in a way that I never thought I could. Every time I come to his office and tell him I want to work on something, he tells me, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”

For Suarez, that freedom encouraged him to explore new subjects that he never would have considered. In addition to studying abstract analysis on the pure math side, he’s also deeply invested in an applied math project. 

Working alongside Levy and Cameron, Suarez developed a model and computational code to predict how the complex behaviors of predators and prey from different age groups might affect the population dynamics of a given species.

“My favorite example is seen in owls and snakes: the snake can eat the egg of the owl, but the [adult] owl eats the snake, so those dynamics are called role reversal,” Suarez explained. “The prey is the predator at some point, but then the predator becomes prey. It’s like a game.”

In addition to his research, Suarez serves as a teaching assistant and tutor to math majors and non-majors alike. He won two UMD teaching awards in recognition of his impact: a 2020-21 Aziz Osborn Gold Medal in Teaching Excellence and a 2022-23 Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award.

Nicholas Cummins, a senior electrical engineering major who had Suarez as a TA for MATH 241: “Calculus III,” noted that Suarez always offered encouragement and guidance when needed.

“Beyond just being knowledgeable about the material and teaching it well, he made sure that we knew he cared about us as both students and human beings,” Cummins said. “Forming a connection in the classroom led to us being close friends outside of academics, so it is common we talk about the things going on in our lives.” 

When Suarez isn’t teaching, tutoring or working on his dissertation, he enjoys baking, writing short fictional stories and weightlifting, somehow finding time to spend three hours in the gym daily. 

While Suarez has loved his time at UMD, he looks forward to trading his student status for a “real-world” job in mathematics. After graduating, he hopes to land an industry job—potentially in mathematical biology or probability and statistics, two fields he never considered before coming to Maryland.

“I have been in school since 2010, so that's 14 years. I'm a little bit exhausted,” Suarez said with a laugh. “But as I used to tell my students, something I've learned during my Ph.D. is that everything worthwhile in life will take effort and time. So sometimes you just need to be patient.”

Written by Emily Nunez