

Russia's Conquering Zeros: Strength of lonely productivity - ypk
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513870490836470.html

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andreyf
_a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear_

Not any less than the Cold War culture did here. From my experience, citizens
of the Soviet Union were a lot more cynical and jaded regarding their
governments' fear mongering than their American counterparts.

 _...all this made mathematicians suspect_

Math, suspect? Because it challenged Stalinism? This is nonsense.

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mnemonicsloth
_Not any less than the Cold War culture did here._

My family name is Polish, which was as good as Russian to the average American
in the early 1950s. I grew up hearing stories about Cold War discrimination
from my grandparents. That sort of paranoia is un-American. It shouldn't
happen here.

But there were deeper reasons for the paranoia that settled over the Soviet
Union during the Cold War, and pretending that some kind of _parity_ exists
between the two is the height of college-campus solipsism:

﻿﻿<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago>

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ramanujan
Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's last theorem for six years in complete secrecy
while he was at Princeton. Thus it's simply not true that isolated
concentration is not possible in the American math world.

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gradschool
It's possible, but the culture is not conducive to it. According to Simon
Singh's book on the subject, Wiles had to go as far as stockpiling several
years' worth of conference papers in advance in unrelated areas so he could
submit one occasionally while he was really working on FLT, just to affect the
appearance of productivity. He also taught a phony graduate course in which
his main collaborator enrolled and most of the other students dropped out,
just so they could use the class time to thrash out some of the details.

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ronnier
Through this article I learned of Israel Gelfand, who died October 5, 2009.
RIP.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Gelfand>

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tokenadult
I didn't realize Israel Gelfand had just died. He is by far my favorite author
of mathematics textbooks. (I even use his photograph as my avatar on the first
website where I used the screenname tokenadult.) His book Algebra

<http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773>

is an inspirational example of how to make a textbook both humorous and
challenging, and is the start of a great series of textbooks on secondary
school mathematics from the viewpoint of advanced mathematics. I use that
textbook in the supplementary math classes I teach, and the students LOVE the
problems. His MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work in mathematics
education (which I just learned about from the Wikipedia article you kindly
shared) was very well deserved.

