Jewish Mathematicians in Russia
The following post on prominent pianist Evgeny Kissin (Евге́ний Ки́син) in X(Twitter) triggered this article on "Jewish Problems" in mathematics, which sheds light on the dark side of Russian society, deep-rooted discrimination against Jews.
今日は、キーシンの誕生日(1971年)
— TTM-LUPE (@TTMLUPE) October 10, 2024
キーシンは母方の姓で、父方の姓はオトマン。「私が生まれる数年前・・・『ユダヤ人とすぐ分かる姓ではアーラチカ（姉）にどんなに秀でた音楽的才能があっても入学できない』と言われたために、父はロシア人の姓に近い響きのキーシンに姓を変えたのだ」(自伝) 1/5 https://t.co/1PO7X61Uuo
The above post refers to the autobiography of Evgeny Igorevich Kissin "Memoirs and Reflections":
"My father changed his last name to Kissin, which sounded more like a Russian surname, because my sister told him, “No matter how musically gifted you are, you can't get in with a surname that's easily recognizable as Jewish."
(Translation back from Japanese.)
According to Wikipedia, Kissin has been an outspoken critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, Kissin and other Russian artists signed a letter against the invasion, which resulted in the following:
It is nothing but horribly ridiculous, and this is what this country (with symbol Z) is all about.
It was probably in 1980 when I was learning at a graduate school at an institute, which just recently (in October 2024) changed its name from Technology to Science, that I came to know Russian mathematician Grigory Margulis relative to the Fields Award in 1978. The article I read then said more or less the same as what is written in Wikipedia:
He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978, but was not permitted to travel to Helsinki to accept it in person, allegedly due to antisemitism against Jewish mathematicians in the Soviet Union. His position improved, and in 1979 he visited Bonn, and was later able to travel freely, though he still worked in the Institute of Problems of Information Transmission, a research institute rather than a university. In 1991, Margulis accepted a professorial position at Yale University.
In 1980 I was vaguely aware of such racial segregation (or anti-Semitism) in USSR, only came to realize the case of Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам) in late 1980 via a book by his wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (Надежда Яковлевна Мандельштам).
Much later, probably just a few years ago, I came to realize the Jewish problems through articles in Quora.
Here is an excerpt from the following article:
1 A personal story of Tanya Khovanova
In the summer of 1975, while I was in a Soviet math camp preparing to compete in the International Math Olympiad on behalf of the Soviet Union, my fellow team members and I were approached for help by Valera Senderov, a math teacher in one of Moscow's best special math schools.
The Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, the most prestigious mathematics school in Russia, was at that time actively trying to keep Jewish students (and other "undesirables") from enrolling in the department. One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find. Any student who failed to answer could easily be rejected, so this system was an effective method of controlling admissions. These kinds of math problems were informally referred to as "Jewish" problems or "coffins". "Coffins" is the literal translation from Russian; they have also been called "killer" problems in English.
These problems and their solutions were, of course, kept secret, but Valera Senderov and his friends had managed to collect a list. In 1975, they approached us to solve these problems, so that they could train the Jewish and other students in these mathematical ideas. Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them. True, that we had other priorities, but this fact speaks to the difficulty of these problems.
Being young and impressionable, I was shaken by this whole situation. I had had no idea that such blatant discrimination had been going on. In addition to trying to solve them at the time, I kept these problems as my most valuable possession I still have that teal notebook.
Later, I emigrated to the United States. When I started my own web page, one of the first things I did was to post some of the problems. People sent me more problems, and solutions to the ones I had. It turned out that not all of the coffins even had elementary solutions: some were intentionally ambiguous questions, some were just plain hard, some had impossible premises. This article is a selection from my collection; we picked out some choice problems that do contain interesting tricks or ideas.
Tanya Khovanova
A simple search in Quora shows number of articles on this particular topic. I learned one case from Piotr Szafranski in his Quora article which points to the following Wikipedia text:
This says "Subbotovskaya herself was interrogated a number of times by the KGB (КГБ) and shortly thereafter was hit by a truck and died, in what has been speculated was an assassination." I'm sure anyone decently educated can tell what "a traffic accident" means in that country… The current situation is deemed to be worse under the ex-KGB vermin.
Back to Grigory Margulis, I was struggling in 1980 to find which area I should focus while studying Algebraic Topology, and I read as many articles as possible. It was very evident that the area of research by Grigory Margulis was far beyond what interested me. 44 years later, I'm still studying mathematics after retirement, and his mathematics is still far away…
Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly (2008)
In closing, let me name a few famous mathematicians with Jewish heritage born in Russia (USSR) in addition to Grigory Margulis:
Alexander Gelfond : Famous with the "Gelfond–Schneider theorem" on transcendental numbers:
Boris Moishezon : He moved to Tel-Aviv in 1972, and is know with Moishezon manifolds, which are defined as follows in Wikipedia:
"In mathematics, a Moishezon manifold M is a compact complex manifold such that the field of meromorphic functions on each component M has transcendence degree equal the complex dimension of the component."
Grigori Perelman : Famous with his proof of Poincaré conjecture, Awarded Fields Medal (2006) for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined...
Oscar Zariski : One of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century. His students include Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar, Michael Artin, Heisuke Hironaka, Joseph Lipman, David Mumford, et al.
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