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By the 1970s, a Soviet math establishment had taken shape. A totalitarian system within a totalitarian system, it provided its members not only with work and money but also with apartments, food, and transportation. It determined where they lived and when, where, and how they traveled for work or pleasure. To those in the fold, it was a controlling and strict but caring mother: Her children were undeniably privileged.
Even for members of the math establishment, though, there were always too few good apartments, too many people wanting to travel to a conference. So it was a vicious, back-stabbing little world, shaped by intrigue, denunciations and unfair competition.
Then there were those who could never join the establishment: those who happened to be born Jewish or female, those who had had the wrong advisers at university or those who could not force themselves to join the Party. For these people, "the most they could hope for was being able to defend their doctoral dissertation at some institute in Minsk, if they could secure connections there," says Sergei Gelfand, publisher of the American Mathematical Society—who also happens to be the son of one of Russia's top 20th-century mathematicians, Israel Gelfand, a student of Mr. Kolmogorov. Some Western mathematicians, Sergei Gelfand adds, "even came for an extended stay because they realized there were a lot of talented people. This was unofficial mathematics."
Math Stars
Besides Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture, there are numerous other famous math solvers, and there are still problems to solve.
Andrew Wiles (1953-)
This Princeton mathematician resolved the most famous problem in numbers—Fermat's Last Theorem—in 1995.
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783)
A Swiss mathematician who made so many contributions, particularly in the early foundations of calculus, that it gets hard to keep track of all that's named for him.
Kurt Gödel (1906–1978)
This Austrian logician demonstrated that any reasonably powerful system of math contains true statements that can't be proven.
The Riemann Hypothesis
To the enduring befuddlement of mathematicians, prime numbers—numbers divisible only by themselves and 1—exhibit no pattern at all: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 are the first few. They aren't evenly spaced but get scarcer the further out you go. No formula can tell you what the next one will be. <span style="font-weight: bold">In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered that a function—known now as the Riemann zeta function (expressed in the graphic above)—appeared to give signposts to where primes lie in the great field of numbers. It provided some order to the mystery. Riemann conjectured that these key signposts—"zeros" of the function—all lie on a single straight line out to infinity, that none are flung off in strange places. In the 150 years since, no one has proved his hypothesis. To a mathematician, the hypothesis looks like this: All non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have a real part equal to ½.</span>
--Charles Forelle
.One such visitor was Dusa McDuff, then a British algebraist and now a professor emerita at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She studied with the older Mr. Gelfand for six months, and credits this experience to opening her eyes both to what mathematics really is: "It was a wonderful education... Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry."
In the mathematical counterculture, math "was almost a hobby," recalls Sergei Gelfand. "So you could spend your time doing things that would not be useful to anyone for the nearest decade." Mathematicians called it "math for math's sake." There was no material reward in this—no tenure, no money, no apartments, no foreign travel; all they stood to gain was the respect of their peers.
Math not only held out the promise of intellectual work without state interference (if also without its support) but also something found nowhere else in late-Soviet society: a knowable singular truth. "If I had been free to choose any profession, I would have become a literary critic," says Georgii Shabat, a well-known Moscow mathematician. "But I wanted to work, not spend my life fighting the censors." The search for that truth could take long years—but in the late Soviet Union, time seemed to stand still.
When it all collapsed, the state stopped investing in math and holding its mathematicians hostage. It's hard to say which of these two factors did more to send Russian mathematicians to the West, primarily the U.S., but leave they did, in what was probably one of the biggest outflows of brainpower the world has ever known. Even the older Mr. Gelfand moved to the U.S. and taught at Rutgers University for nearly 20 years, almost until his death in October at the age of 96. The flow is probably unstoppable by now: A promising graduate student in Moscow or St. Petersburg, unable to find a suitable academic adviser at home, is most likely to follow the trail to the U.S.
But the math culture they find in America, while less back-stabbing than that of the Soviet math establishment, is far from the meritocratic ideal that Russia's unofficial math world had taught them to expect. American math culture has intellectual rigor but also suffers from allegations of favoritism, small-time competitiveness, occasional plagiarism scandals, as well as the usual tenure battles, funding pressures and administrative chores that characterize American academic life. This culture offers the kinds of opportunities for professional communication that a Soviet mathematician could hardly have dreamed of, but it doesn't foster the sort of luxurious, timeless creative work that was typical of the Soviet math counterculture.
For example, the American model may not be able to produce a breakthrough like the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, carried out by the St. Petersburg mathematician Grigory Perelman.
<span style="color: #FF0000"> Mr. Perelman came to the United States as a young postdoctoral student in the early 1990s and immediately decided that America was math heaven; he wrote home demanding that his mother and his younger sister, a budding mathematician, move here. But three years later, when his postdoc hiatus was over and he was faced with the pressures of securing an academic position, he returned home, disillusioned.</span>
In St. Petersburg he went on the (admittedly modest) payroll of the math research institute, where he showed up infrequently and generally kept to himself for almost seven years, one of the greatest mathematical discoveries of at least the last hundred years. It's all but impossible to imagine an American institution that could have provided Mr. Perelman with this kind of near-solitary existence, free of teaching and publishing obligations.
<span style="font-weight: bold">After posting his proof on the Web, Mr. Perelman traveled to the U.S. in the spring of 2003, to lecture at a couple of East Coast universities. He was immediately showered with offers of professorial appointments and research money, and, by all accounts, he found these offers gravely insulting,</span> as he believes the monetization of achievement is the ultimate insult to mathematics. So profound was his disappointment with the rewards he was offered that, I believe, it contributed a great deal to his subsequent decision to quit mathematics altogether, along with the people who practice it. (He now lives with his mother on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.)
A child of the Soviet math counterculture, he still held a singular truth to be self-evident: Math as it ought to be practiced, math as the ultimate flight of the imagination, is something money can't buy.
Masha Gessen's latest book is "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century,"
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