He was a very good presenter, very well organised. I always attended his class with great pleasure. ... Nápoles walked very straight, very fast and I don't think I've ever met anyone who managed the blackboard area like he did. Simply by attending his class one learned what was needed. He compared very favourably with the mathematics teachers I had been given in high school.

One day we began to notice him nervous and worried, then he announced that the course would have to be shortened and the final examination would be in August. From the newspapers we learned the cause of his concern: he had just been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue higher studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first Mexican mathematician to obtain such an honour. From that moment, our respect for him took a quantum leap.

The Committee of Selection in Mexico for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation takes great pleasure in announcing that, upon its nomination and recommendation, the Trustees of the Foundation have appointed Mr Alfonso Nápoles Gándara and Dr Arturo Rosenblueth Stearns to the first Latin American Fellowships granted by the Foundation in Mexico. The Committee of Selection in Mexico ... received some 50 applications for the two fellowships offered by the Guggenheim Foundation for the year 1930. These applications came from various States of the Republic and represented almost every field of intellectual endeavour. The attainments and plans for study of many of the applicants were of the highest type and the committee was able to make its final selections only after a great deal of difficult study and comparison. After a careful consideration of each case, however, the committee was unanimous in the opinion that the greatest contributions, in line with the purposes of the Foundation, would be made by Doctor Rosenblueth and Mr Nápoles.

The object of Doctor Nápoles' fellowship will be to permit him to engage in a study of higher mathematics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to pursue further study in the principles of pedagogy and methods of teaching mathematics in secondary schools. Doctor Nápoles has had many years' experience as teacher of mathematics in the secondary schools of Mexico City and is at present professor of that subject in the College of Engineering of the National University of Mexico.

Highly impressed with the large number of innovative courses that he found at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, many of them never before studied in Mexico, Nápoles Gándara set himself the goal of learning as many subjects as possible in order to bring them to our country. In just 18 months and through an extraordinary effort, he managed to internalise himself in a large number of topics, including Mathematical Analysis, Differential Geometry, Tensor Calculus, Fourier Series and the Theory of Functions. The lectures that he gave upon his return became the main basis for training a group of young higher mathematics teachers, which would later constitute the physical-mathematical faculty of our Faculty of Sciences.

Parallel to teaching, research began to be organised when in 1932, and at the initiative of a group headed by Sotera Prieto, Nápoles Gándara, Jorge Quijano and Mariano Hernández, the Section of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics was formed at the Antonio Alzate National Academy of Sciences. The weekly sessions that were held for several years were one of the first stimuli received by mathematical research in Mexico. Several professors participated in this mathematical seminar, as well as a group of distinguished students of Sotera Prieto and Nápoles Gándara.

It was an escape valve for some distinguished professors and students in the exact sciences. Like an oasis in the aridity of the environment. There they were able to present some original research papers in physics and mathematics, and develop several topics of higher study in both disciplines. A new, promising era for physics and mathematics was beginning.

Nápoles published little, had few disciples, his life has an anticlimactic taste, there are no great deeds, there are no great acts of heroism. It was a thankless job: organising, raising money, convincing the authorities of the time that mathematics existed. In a way, life, the long life of Nápoles, had a taste of sadness, of loneliness, of an inner conviction that is proof against any bureaucratic obstacle that might arise, an inner conviction that one day we would be here as we are today.

... mathematics is a very abstract science and difficult; being difficult in general is not very attractive for the students. [However] mathematics exercises the mind and helps the student to reason and decide correctly. But not everyone realises this. Know to foresee and foresee to act. The one who is going to act must foresee, but in order to foresee, one must know. A person who studies mathematics, due to its structure and practice of logic, acquires greater abilities to predict than those who do not study it. Those who study mathematics are taught to reason correctly, for that is its main purpose. As I have told my students: it doesn't matter if you forget the name of the theorem and what it consists of; but by studying it they understood and exercised reasoning. It is an intellectual exercise that when it is done it leaves its mark.