uebla, México embraces la ‘Ciudad de las Ideas’ or the City of Ideas,” for the tenth consecutive year this November 17-19th. The international festival of brilliant minds, is “a celebration of the creativity and curiosity of the human being,” said Andrés Roemer, curator and co-founder of the event, the only one of its kind.
La Ciudad de las Ideas is an initiative created ten years ago by Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Roemer.
Aside from placing Mexico before the world, the priority of the conference is to encourage critical thinking, the organizers said.
“We are totally convinced that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge,'” Roemer said, paraphrasing Albert Einstein, considered to be the most important scientist of the 20th century.
The best minds in the world
Improving the world is their goal and for that “we have the best minds in the world contributing their ideas so that in one way or another they germinate in their brains and many more ideas are born,” he said.
The festival will have the participation of renowned linguist, philosopher, historian, social critic and political activist, Noam Chomsky. He is considered one of the founders in the field of cognitive science – the scientific study of the mind and its processes – and author of more than 100 books in which he tackles topics on linguistics, war, politics and the media, among others.
While he was Mexico’s consul in San Francisco, Roemer, a graduate from turn University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University, created the “Mex I Can” to highlight the talent of Mexicans living abroad and those that have made great contributions to the sciences, which then developed into La Ciudad de las Ideas. This year one of the guests in the segment is Samuel Tobias, a neurosurgeon who was born and raised in Mexico and who currently works in a hospital on the Israel-Syria border.
Also attending will be the Nobel Prize-winning chemical engineer and UNAM graduate, Mario Molina, one of the world’s pioneering researchers in atmospheric chemistry.
“What’s beautiful about ideas is that they don’t have borders, passports, or limits.”