http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem–math—anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446
A look at anti-Semitic university admissions in the USSR from the perspective of a leading mathematician.
Burke
was right!
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, I thought math was a stale, boring subject.1 I could solve all of the problems and ace all of the exams at school, but what we discussed in class seemed pointless, irrelevant. What really excited me was Quantum Physics. I devoured all the popular books on this subject I could get my hands on. But these books didn’t go far enough in answering deeper questions about the structure of the universe, so I wasn’t fully satisfied.
As luck would have it, I got help from a family friend. I grew up in a small industrial town called Kolomna, population 150 thousand, which was about seventy miles away from Moscow, or just over two hours by train. My parents worked as engineers at a large company, making heavy machinery. One of their friends was a mathematician by the name of Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov, who was a professor at a local college preparing school teachers. A meeting was arranged.
Then in his late forties, Evgeny Evgenievich was friendly and unassuming. Bespectacled and with beard stubble, he was just like what I imagined a mathematician would look like, and yet there was something captivating in the probing gaze of his big eyes. They exuded curiosity about everything. Knowing that I was fascinated with the quantum world, he convinced me that spectacular advances in this field were all based on hardcore mathematics.
“If you really want to understand it, you have to first learn math,” he said.
At school we studied things like quadratic equations, basic Euclidean geometry, and trigonometry. I had always assumed that all mathematics somehow revolved around these subjects: perhaps problems became more complicated, but they still remained within the same general framework with which I was familiar. But what Evgeny Evgenievich showed me were the glimpses of an entirely different world, an invisible parallel universe, whose existence I hadn’t even imagined. It was love at first sight.
I started meeting with Evgeny Evgenievich on a regular basis. He would give me books to read, and, at our meetings, I would tell him what I learned and ask follow-up questions. Evgeny Evgenievich played soccer, ice hockey, and volleyball with enthusiasm, but like many men in the Soviet Union in those days, he was also a chain smoker. For a long time afterwards, the smell of cigarettes was, in my mind, associated with doing mathematics.
I was learning quickly, and the deeper I delved into math, the more my fascination grew. Sometimes our meetings would last well into the night. Once, the auditorium we were in was locked by the custodian who couldn’t fathom that there would be someone inside at such a late hour. And we must have been so deep into conversation that we didn’t hear the turning of the key. Fortunately, the auditorium was on the ground floor, and we managed to escape through the window!
It was 1984, my senior year at high school. I had to decide which university to apply to. Moscow had many schools, but there was only one place to study pure math: Moscow State University, known by its Russian abbreviation MGU, Moskovskiy Gosudarstvenny Universitet. Its famous Mekh-Mat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, was the flagship mathematics program of the USSR. Since I wanted to study pure math, I had no choice but to apply there.
Unlike the U.S., there are entrance exams to colleges in Russia. At Mekh-Mat there were four: written math, oral math, an essay on literature, and oral physics. I had, by then, progressed far beyond high school math, so it looked like I would sail through these exams.
