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Born on December 10,
1954, in Balcesti (district of Valcea), Romania, wrote in three languages:
Romanian, French, and English.
Poet, playwright, novelist, writer
of prose, tales for children, translator from many languages, experimental
painter, philosopher, physicist, mathematician.
American citizen.
He graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at
the University of Craiova in 1979, got a Ph. D. in Mathematics from the
State University of Kishinev in 1997, and continued postdoctoral studies
at various American Universities after emigration.
In U.S. he worked as a software engineer for Honeywell (1990-1995),
adjunct professor for Pima Community College (1995-1997), and since 1997
Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, Gallup Campus, where
in 2003 he was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics.
During the Romanian communist era he got in conflict with authorities.
In 1986 he did the hunger strike for being refused to attend the
International Congress of Mathematicians at the University of Berkeley,
then published a letter in the Notices of the American Mathematical
Society for the freedom of circulating of scientists, and became a
dissident. As a consequence, he remained unemployed for almost two
years, living from private tutoring done to students. The Swedish
Royal Academy Foreign Secretary Olof G. Tandberg contacted him by
telephone from Bucharest.
Not being allowed to publish, he tried to get his manuscripts out of the
country through
the French School of Bucharest and tourists, but for many of them he lost
track.
Escaped from Romania in September 1988 and waited almost two years in the
political refugee camps of Turkey, where he did unskilled works in
construction in order to survive: scavenger, house painter, whetstoner.
Here he kept in touch with the French Cultural Institutes that facilitated
him the access to books and rencontres with personalities.
He left behind his peasant parents (although the only child of them),
pregnant wife (he saw his second born son Silviu two years and half when
the family reunited to America), a seven year old son Mihai.
Before leaving the country he buried some of his manuscripts in a metal
box in his parents vineyard, near a peach tree, that he retrieved four
years later, after the 1989 Revolution, when he returned for the
first time to his native country. Other manuscripts, that he
tried to mail to a translator in France, were confiscated by the secret
police and never returned.
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