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The Piedmont Highlander

The writings of Aristotle

aristotle
Senior Aristotle Magganas in his room with stacks of research papers. His room is one of three rooms in his house in which he researches.

When senior Aristotle Magganas opens up a book, he doesn’t start on the first page. Instead, he flips to center, searching for whatever piques his interest.

“I don’t read cover to cover,” Magganas said. “I had a fancy for encyclopedias and reference books as a child, so I just open to a page and read.”

He then bounces around, moving forward and backward from page to page. To follow up on questions or references, he moves to the web.

Research like this is Magganas’ pastime. Ever since last summer, the senior has helped UC Berkeley Graduate Professor of Public Health Ralph Catalano and a graduate student research and write an evolutionary biology paper involving economics, Magganas’ passion.

“It’s a theory in evolutionary biology that has to do with when a population is stressed, males are more frail when they are kids,” he said. “You would expect [mothers] to have fewer male children… the idea is that they would selectively abort.”

Magganas, who has taken Multivariable Calculus and Discrete Mathematics at Berkeley, emailed Catalano for the research opportunity.

“He understood that I have some interest in economics, and apparently, some promise, so when he heard that I was interested in something that might involve academia, he said, ‘Oh, maybe you can work with me,”’ Magganas said.

To begin the project, the graduate professor gave Magganas a paper to read before they first met.

“He gave me this paper that was really long and talks about the effect of business cycles, fluctuations, and GDP and employment,” he said. “It was about fluctuations in the macro economy and its effects on health. It had subsections like mortality, child health, alcoholism and substance abuse.”

Magganas researches the topic at home and meets once a week for an hour and a half with Catalano at Peet’s Coffee and Tea on Lakeshore to discuss theory developments.

Following Catalano’s recommendation, Magganas recently gathered economic data from Australia for the research project. Magganas is the third author of the paper and was even in charge of writing a section of the report, he said.

Now that the report is close to completion, Magganas and the graduate student are reading and critiquing. The next step, he said, is submitting the Berkeley paper to academic journals that would publish the work.

Evolutionary Applications is the name of the journal, but it might be Human Reproduction,” he said.  “Hopefully, we don’t just get flat-out rejected, but that is also a possibility. If we get that result, we’ll submit it to a bunch of journals and hope that one will catch.”

Magganas said he aspires to become an economics professor and researcher. As a professor, one of his goals will be to improve upon the world’s economic systems, he said.

“I feel that the purpose of the studying the economy is to illuminate things for the real world,” he said. “Economics is helpful; it’s socially useful and the point of academia is to relate to reality because it is something that has a lot of social utility if we get it right.”

The senior is trilingual, speaking English and Greek from birth and later picking up Spanish. Still, at home, Magganas’ family embraces its Greek culture.

“Greek was my first language along with English,” he said. “My family does this thing, I think linguists call it co-switching, where both languages play at the same time in the same conversation or sentence and we don’t notice any change.”

Magganas’ parents named him after the philosopher, Aristotle, paying homage to his Greek roots.

“My brother is named after Alexander the Great, and it’s because Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the Great,” Magganas said.

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