Russia's Conquering Zeros: Strength of lonely productivity | Hacker News Reader

Russia's Conquering Zeros: Strength of lonely productivity

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73 pointsypk14 comments

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.

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.

Right, the analogy between Wiles/Fermat and Perelman/Poincaré so glaringly contradicts what she's saying ("the American model may not be able to produce a breakthrough like the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture" - huh?) that one has to wonder. Perhaps this explains it?

Masha Gessen's latest book is [...] a story of Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture.

Isolated concentration is an issue for more than just mathematicians... Everyone needs to serve their basic survival needs (food, sleep, sex) before focus on abstract subjects can take place; isolated concentration is a theme for anyone that enjoys something abstract only for the sake of itself.

This can include computer scientists, scientists, astronomers, philosophers, mathematicians, &c... The need for psychic solitude is common amongst thinkers in general and it is difficult to achieve it within the society we are in; particularly so when what you love to do is also your primary income generator. Hence why you see many table waiting programmers or chefs that love to do math at night.

Isolated concentration does not imply complete secrecy.

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.

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

Not math, mathematicians. And the reasons didn't have to make a lick of sense for Stalin to want to purge you and your entire field.

The irony rings clear even today.

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

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

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.

His biog says he skipped high school and went straight to grad school - that also wouldn't be possible here. He would need the correct number on his "key stage 3 year 11" exams to be entered into the computer before he could be allowed to do key stage 12 exams.

Strange how we supposedly won the cold war but the losers system seems to have been adopted.

We have had to stop accepting child geniuses into our maths dept because anybody that works with under 18s (even escorting them on a campus tour for an open day) now needs extensive police checks - 'to protect the children'.

Searching Google, I assume you're Australian? I don't know what "stage 12 exams" are.

In the US it's quite possible for a child gifted in mathematics to skip all sorts of things. My third year of college I taught 11th graders the subject I had just covered the previous quarter, Algebraic Topology, and also the theory of computation.

The 9th and 10th graders in the program were learning linear algebra and Scheme (the programming language).

It's weird to be in a room full of people who are in high school and are approximately 100x better at the subject you're studying.

UK - I was making an ironic point that the name of the tests seem to change and get more 'bureaucratic speak' every year.

Under a soviet centralised government system there was apparently more freedom to teach to the student's abilities than in the free world - where everything must match upto the central government stanardized testing quango.

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