You failed your math test, comrade Einstein

[Maria Droujkova]

The book offers some background essays and an excellent collection of creative, deep problems.

The collection was used to prevent Jewish applicants from entering math departments of top Soviet universities. They are extremely cool problems, used to commit atrocities. What a macabre piece of math history! The practice continued up to 1988.

It was especially hurtful for boys, who had to serve two years in the army if they failed their entrance exams to a university. In Soviet Union, you could only apply to one university per year (with a few exceptions, allowing two applications per year).

Full PDF of the book: http://www.tpi.umn.edu/shifman/ComradeEinstein.pdf

Quotes...

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Everybody knows that the Soviet Union had a great culture of chess. Many outstanding chess players of the 20th century were from the USSR. Much less known, however, is another remarkable cultural tradition, which I will refer to as the “Math Movement,” with capital M’s. Quite different from recreational mathematics in the West, Math Movement mathematics was a unique phenomenon in the social life of the country, if the term “social life” is at all applicable to communist regimes. The tradition was upheld and promoted by a great variety of enthusiasts – from 13-year-old schoolboys and girls, to seasoned mathematics professors. The phenomenon hit every large city of the country that spanned eleven time zones. These enthusiasts were engaged in creating contrived, complex and intellectually challenging math problems which could be solved, in principle, on the basis of elementary mathematics (i.e. “mathematics before calculus”), as it was taught in Soviet schools. They strived to get nonstandard solutions to these problems, and to disseminate knowledge about such problems and their solutions in every school and every class.

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“Don’t worry, we will flunk them all...” From an overheard conversation of a mathematics professor with the Chairman of an Admission Committee

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The tactics used for cutting off Jewish students were very simple. At the entrance examination, special groups of “undesirable applicants” were organized. They were then offered killer problems which were among the hardest from the set circulated in mathematical circles, quite frequently at the level of international mathematical competitions. Sometimes they were deliberately flawed. Even if an exceptionally bright Jewish student occasionally overcame this barrier in the written examination, zealous professors would adjust the oral exam appropriately, to make sure that this student flunked the oral exam.

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Needless to say, the Soviet state did not want it to become public knowledge, especially in the West. The silence was first broken by dissidents and Jewish refuseniks in the 1980s in a series of samizdat essays, one of the first and the most famous of which, Intellectual Genocide, was written by Boris Kanevsky and Valery Senderov in 1980. This book presents the first publication of this essay. As you will see, it is very factual and is based on a study of 87 Moscow high school graduates from six special math schools, many of whom had won prizes in national mathematics Olympiads. The bulk of the essay is an unemotional comparative analysis of various math problems given to “desirable” and “undesirable” applicants, with statistically motivated conclusions at the end. The essay was deemed a political provocation, and heavy consequences ensued shortly. One of the authors, Valery Senderov, was sentenced to seven years in prison and 5 years in exile on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Boris Kanevsky was also arrested and spent three years in prison


Cheers,
Dr. Maria Droujkova
moebiusnoodles.com
919-388-1721

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