We came to live in a vacant lot where there were some shacks, near the General Hospital. At the age of two my father vanished, got lost in the big city, left and never came back. My mother returned to the village, where they had some pieces of land that they continued to cultivate, and I stayed with my older brothers. They started working in spinning and weaving factories, later they became drivers, all very hard-working. I never left the district of Doctores, where I spent my childhood and adolescence in an environment of blacksmiths, carpenters and drivers.

Nápoles had a great personality and walked with an air of great dignity through the central courtyard.

Julio Torri was my literature teacher. When Torri got to the classroom, he was met by a mob of crazy people, who were fighting and yelling, and he would sit very dignified at the desk, he would open his book and wait until everyone calmed down.

Graef was very jocular, cheerful, and a great athlete. On walks he would talk to me about his mathematical friends and the history of mathematics. He taught me vector calculus by chatting.

The variability of U Pegasi was discovered by Chandler in 1894. Visual observations established the fact that it was a short period variable and subsequent observations have shown it to be an eclipsing binary of W Ursae Majoris type, with a period of about 0.375 days. ... The present study was undertaken with the purpose of investigating the constancy of the period of U Pegasi and determining an accurate light curve for the star.

With the money that Luis Enrique Erro gave me to go to Chicago and with the scholarship that Solomon Lefschetz gave me, I was able to pay for my first year in Princeton. After that year I passed the examinations and they gave me a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to finish my doctorate.

Although I was received with kindness and courtesy, the academic atmosphere was disillusioned. The splendid works of Graef and Barajas had been left behind and there was an atmosphere of depression, there was no confidence that theorems could be proved. The responsibility for the mathematical work was carried out by Roberto Vázquez, who asked me to organise a course or, failing that, a seminar on algebraic topology. I agreed to do the seminar on the condition that José Adem was invited to participate. We read the book 'Algebraic Topology' by Professor Lefschetz. The first chapter we read was relatively easy, because it had been written by Chevalley, but the subsequent chapters, written by Lefschetz in the style of the old French school, proved really difficult. But facing the challenge with humility and a deep critical spirit allowed us to achieve our purpose.

The International Symposium on Algebraic Topology was held in Mexico at Ciudad Universitaria in August 1956, at the initiative of a group of researchers from the Institute of Mathematics of the National University, the National Institute of Scientific Research and the Mexican Mathematical Society, with the cooperation of various men of science from foreign academies. This scientific event was carried out with the moral and economic support of the Federal Government of our Republic, and the cooperation of some national institutions ... and foreign institutions, the American Mathematical Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and UNESCO, to whom we publicly give our most sincere thanks.

By opening one of these books and noting that it was donated by one of the most important researchers the country has had in the field of mathematics, students can find out who Recillas Juárez was and what he has meant to the Institute. Dr Recillas Juárez was very important in the development of Mexican mathematics and he had a special interest all his life in books on this science. He had a really precious and very well selected collection. It is a great honour to be chosen to host this collection.

Félix Recillas shared with the mathematicians of his generation the dream of building mathematics schools in Mexico with international impact. He always had a piece of advice, a word of encouragement, towards those he believed to be interested in research in mathematics. He was a tireless propagandist for those mathematical topics that he saw as central, he organised seminars, lent books, got whoever he saw interested in a topic of his interest invitations to international schools or congresses. We will remember him with gratitude and affection.

He was extremely honest, quite a gentleman, but he had a strong, tough character ... He was very strict academically, but his human part was very good with people ... He never forced us to be scientists but he gave us the example ... he was doing mathematics at his desk, at home. He told us that we had to be very humble about science.

When the scientific culture of a country is in formation, the paths that the sciences will follow will be regulated by their founders, and not only the paths, but also the ambitions, illusions and above all the audacity to set goals, apparently utopian, for the development of these sciences. In the case of Mexican mathematics, Félix Recillas is one of the first to raise such goals, apparently illusory in our environment regarding the development of mathematics. He insisted "You have to study the great contemporary mathematical schools" and he gave importance to modern algebraic geometry, Lie groups, the teachings of Weil, Grothendieck, Mumford, Tate and many more. He encouraged a new generation to study algebraic groups, automorphic forms, analysis of locally compact groups, and many other topics that were beginning to have relevance. He was the one who made students aware of the Langlands' program of uniting various branches of mathematics and of the importance of not artificially subdividing mathematics into mutually alien branches. The development of modern mathematics in Mexico is largely due to the tenacious work of Félix Recillas. We can never thank him enough for his efforts.