Born in Québec in 1976, son of Joaquim and Agostinha, first-generation Portuguese immigrants. My father arrived in Québec at seventeen, in 1967; he was a welder. Two moves in early childhood, two languages, two cultures, two parents who still carried the ocean crossing inside them. Early uprooting inscribed chaos as a posture. A constant hunger for attention. Turbulent. Too alive, too much, a show-off. A loudmouth.
I see life backwards, or the right way round, depending on the perspective. I have always seen it that way: the hidden face of things first. People often thought I contradicted for the sake of contradicting. I understand today what they saw, but it was never to look cleverer. I simply saw the other side.
Sport as a release valve. Excellent in every sport I played. But the loud mouth got in the way of recognition: doors that could have opened closed again because I did not know how to keep quiet at the right moment. A serious injury ended the athletic trajectory. Depression. Drugs. A lot of drugs, for a long time.
Met Sophie at 26. Boom. The trajectory tipped. Everything that was floating began to anchor. Father of four children: Justin, Soleil, Delfine and Yanie.
Studies in political science at Université Laval. Then entry into the real. Founder and seller of what was then the largest digital media company in Canada. Co-founder of Fanoweb. Shareholder of D2technologie Inc. since 2006, which became the leading TELUS B2B dealer in Canada. Owner of the Aigles de Nice, a professional hockey club. Restaurants. Twenty years of walking in the real before putting into words what I saw.
I live in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec. I have kept a pied-à-terre in Vale de Cambra, Portugal, the village the family line comes from. I also spend much of my time in Nice, where the Aigles play.
ARC is today my main intellectual calling. It is not a commercial venture. It is the progressive inscription of the structural grammar I see at work in arithmetic, in matter, in life and in human societies. The work has intensified over the last eighteen months. The corpus is deposited on Zenodo under the CC BY 4.0 licence: free to access, free to reuse.
Why I do all this
My first motivation is inequality and injustice, all of it: the homeless, and everyone who suffers. I am privileged and I have succeeded. I travel, I love beauty and luxury, and I do not hide it; but I give a lot, and it makes me sad to see others suffer.
The decisive day was the one when I understood that the answer was neither on the left nor on the right: people follow what they are taught, and the problem is neither political nor economic. So I had to look elsewhere. I have always known that the monster is invisible. The invisible hand of the market has all the power of collapse, and nobody holds it, like my 4.5, the empty centre that nobody occupies. I had to find where, in the system, that empty centre existed, and how it could have been occupied without anyone noticing.
Going back through history in reverse, I came upon the tools: the remainder that throws away the turns, the decimal that gets cut, the zero taken for nothing. I do not do this for money or for fame, but out of gratitude: I believe everything is luck, and having had the luck to understand the world is a responsibility.
I do it now, especially now, because my parents are getting old and they are the ones who shaped me. My father gave me rigour, "proofs, not words"; my mother, sensitivity and empathy. This work is my way of thanking them and telling them all my love. I also do it for my children, and for everyone else's children.
My method, in six moves
Observe first. I start from what anyone can redo with a pencil: the nine digits, their multiplication table, what comes back and what answers what. I invent nothing, I read.
Every sentence carries its status. Theorem: a finite computation, verified by a program attached to the document. Fact: what science holds today, with its method and its sources. Reading: my interpretation, declared as such. Prediction: a dated bet, with what would bring it down. Open site: what remains open.
Nothing is written without being verified. Every calculation is redone by a script before it enters a text. An error found is corrected publicly and dated.
Contradiction is a tool. I work with several artificial intelligences (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, GLM). They start from received science; I contradict them, I show where the logic has holes, then we produce the piece, and I have each piece audited by the others. The models, the questions, the readings and the rules are mine; the calculations and the wording are assisted, and every document says so.
Read history from the inside. To understand why an idea was adopted, I enter its period as if I lived there, with what political science and the psychology of power taught me. One does not read history without empathy.
Accept falling. Every prediction says in advance what would refute it. The corpus even contains a paper, Bringing ARC Down, which gives the reader the means to contradict it.
Saudade
I carry Portuguese blood and the line that crossed the ocean. I carry saudade as an operating grammar, not as mere atmosphere. I received it from my father. It is not nostalgia: it is the disposition to move forward despite doubt, to turn doubt into faith at the moment of risk, to take the blow for tomorrow with a smile. It is also accepting to do things against one's own intentions in order to help, and to pay the price. My father had it deep in his gut: people thought he was sad, he was following his path. Determinism is realised by walking.
I carry the conviction that the structural coherence that holds the world together is observable, and that it has been lost from view by a contemporary science that goes ever deeper into detail without seeing the regularities that emerge at every scale. I write it down so that it is not lost again.