Biography|Carlos Slim — The Mining Palace Where Engineers Marked His Fiftieth Year

On 28 May 2013 the Palacio de Minería on Calle Tacuba filled with the associations that speak for Mexican engineering.

Carlos Slim Helú was there for a ceremony his office called the fiftieth anniversary of his UNAM civil-engineering graduate title. His own site dated the evening and named the hall.

CNN places the degree in 1961. A professional cédula is sometimes cited for 1964. Fifty years from either date does not land cleanly on 2013, so the anniversary is the organizers' label, not a measured interval.

UNAM's rector, José Narro Robles, handed the acknowledgment.

The Engineers and Architects Association of Mexico, the Civil Engineers College, the Chamber of the Building Industry and the faculty alumni society stood on the presidium with him.

The palace is not a metaphor. Manuel Tolsá designed it between 1797 and 1813 as the Royal School of Mines.

It later housed the National School of Engineering, before that school moved to Ciudad Universitaria in the 1950s.

UNAM still owns the building. The Faculty of Engineering runs it as a museum and cultural seat at Tacuba 5, across Plaza Manuel Tolsá from the equestrian Charles IV.

Slim had taken the degree on the new southern campus. The old palace was where the profession chose to stage the anniversary.

The event pins a public fact that biographies bury under the Telmex number. Before the auction, before Grupo Carso, he was an engineer who taught algebra while finishing the course.

Narro called him a university man. The room was full of classmates from the generation of 1957.

Tacuba 5 is open to visitors most days. The ceremony itself is over.

What remains is the building the engineers still treat as theirs, and the title Slim never dropped.

Photo: main facade of the Palacio de Minería, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Imperio Reséndiz, Presidencia de la República, public domain.