CAMBRIDGE, MA – Harvard postdoc and undocumented immigrant Juan Rivera has made waves in the political and mathematical worlds by proving his right to remain in the country without US citizenship. In his paper, Rivera argues that the proof against his deportation “is trivial and left to the reader as an exercise in empathy and humanity." 

“The inclusion map for different racial and national identities into the American vector space is well-defined, thanks to hundreds of years of progress. The proof is quite self-explanatory from there,” said Rivera, on the content of his paper. “Even though I’m undocumented, I still satisfy the properties of a canonical American citizen: I pay taxes, I follow the law, and thus I am well-behaved. My undocumented status does not imply pathology.”

Rivera is under consideration for the 2018 Fields medal for his work. But it still remains to be seen whether the Trump administration’s vetting process will deem his proof rigorous enough. Said one Trump adviser: “We do not consider the US an open neighborhood, and undocumented immigrants are abnormal subgroups of those entering our country.”

Rivera’s research advisers are optimistic, however. “By the empathy axioms, he’s demonstrated that his family’s an invariant subspace of the American population. You can’t just apply a linear deportation to elements of his family and have them end up in different countries, it’s basic linear algebra!” said Peter Kronheimer, chair of the Department of Mathematics.

Rivera’s current research involves reversing the polar decomposition of the American two-party system.