Rotary Valencia physics prize (1995)

In June 1995 I received the Rotary Valencia physics prize together with my classmate Francisco Camarena Femenía. We were two twenty‑year‑old physics students armed with curiosity, a lot of late nights in the lab, and a project that tried to make wave phenomena easier to visualise for high‑school students.

The award was 125,000 pesetas—about 750 € at the time—which felt like a fortune. More important than the money was the feeling that rigorous work could actually resonate outside the classroom. It was the first public validation of a path that would later take me into research and, eventually, software.

I recently digitalised the original write‑up. You can browse the Spanish PDF here. It is a charming snapshot of mid‑90s scientific outreach, complete with diagrams painstakingly drawn in CorelDRAW and equations typed in WordPerfect.

What I keep from that experience is the sense of possibility. Recognition opens doors, sure, but mostly it tells you that the ideas inside your notebook might be worth sharing.