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在老俄罗斯，数学家、作曲家和电影制片人，常在一起散步喝酒谈话
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读书笔记
2月间，断断续续在读Masha Gessen的新书《 Perfect Rigor [A genius]+[the Mathemaical Breakthrogh of the Century] 》（出版社：HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT. BOSTON/NEW YORK 2009）。20世纪俄罗斯的数学呈现在眼前，有一种颠覆感，自己有限的历史知识向逆推：20世纪中，俄罗斯数学对中国数学的影响，俄罗斯的数学。
书的介绍： The true story of a mathematical mystery , a million--dollar prize, and the fate of genius in today's world.
对我来说， 这本书特殊之一，作者并没有亲自采访到Grigory Perelman，但她呈现他成长的历史背景和他的成长过程，活生生的， it's great。 她本身是一位在俄罗斯成长起来的数学天才，高中时代随父母移民美国，现居住于俄罗斯。新邻居刚好是来自俄罗斯的犹太人科学家家庭，他们家也有好多书和电影，更增加了我读这本书的兴趣。
书中所写俄罗斯数学家的生活： “Classical music and male bonding, mathematics and sports, poetry and ideas added up to Kolgorov's vision of the ideal man and the ideal school.”
P39 Before the Iron Curtain sealed off the Soviet Union from the rest of the world, Kolmogorov and Alexandrov had done some traveling.......They imported all they could: books, music, ideas. "Interestin that this idea of a truly beloved friend seems to be purely Aryan: The Greeks and the Bermans seem always to have had it ." Alexandrov wrote to Kolgorov in 1931, a few years before the reference to Aryans would have had a different connotation. "The theory of a lone friend is a difficult to fulfill in the contemporary world. "
Kolmogorov lamented in response. "The wife will always have pretensions to that role,but it would be too sad to consent to this . In Aristotle's times, these two sides of the issue never came into contact: the wife was one thing, and the friend quite another. "
Kolmogorov brought back from Germany collections of verse by Goethe, who would always be his favorite poet. In all their letters to each other, Kolmogorov and Alexandrov inclded detailed reports of concerts attended and music heard, and when vinyl record became available, they started collecting them. ALexandrov hosted weekly classic-music evenings at the university; he would play records and lecture on the music and the composers; ater Alexandrov's death, Kolmogorov---already nearing eighty and crippled by Parkinson's disease---took over as host.
这竟然与几天后所读数学家Freeman Dyson的文章 Birds and Frogse中所写相同，真是君子所见：
“In Russia, Mathematicians and composers and film-producers talk to one another, walk together in the snow on winter nighs, sit together over a bottle of wine, and share each other's thoughts.”
我爱这句话，我爱这篇文章，发誓要把它翻译出来！
Dyson写道：
"To end this talk, I come back to Yuri Manin and his book Mathematics. The book is mainly about mathematics. It may come as a surprise to Western readers that he writes with equal eloquence about other subjucts such as the collective unconscious, the origin of human language, the psychology of autism, and the role of the trickster in the mythology of many cultures. To his compatriots in Russia, such many-sided interests and expertise would come as no surprise. Russian intellectuals maintain the proud tradition of the
old Russina intelligentsia, with scientists and poets and artists and musicians belonging to a single community. They are still today, as we see them in the plays of Chekhov, a group of indalists bound together by their alienation from a superstitious society and a capricious government. In Russia, Mathematicians and composers and film-producers talk to one another, walk together in the snow on winter nighs, sit together over a bottle of wine, and share each other's thoughts. "
Masha Gessen书中的介绍：
Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the United States--and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russia---Gessen set out to uncover the nature of Perelman's genius. What she found was a mind of almost superhuman computational power. Perelman was not intuitive or deeply imaginative as some mathemeaticians are, but his clear and rigorous thinking enabled him to pursue mathematical concepts to their logical(sometimes distant)end.
Yet this very strength turend out to be his undoing. As Gessen discovered, such a mind is unable to cope with the messy reality of human affairs. When the jealous, rivalries, and passions of life intruded on his platonic ideal, Perelman began to withdraw--first from the world of mathematics and then, increasingly, from the world im general. In telling his story, Masha Gessen has constructed a gripping and tragic tale sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius.
P27 How to make a mathematician:
Similarly, he(Rukshin) told me several times that his teaching methods could be reproduced, and had been, to rather spectacular results: his students made money by training math competitors all over the former Soviet bloc. But other times he told me he was a magician, and these were the times he seemed most sincere. "There are several stages of teaching ," he said. "There are the student, apprenticeship stages, like in the medieval guild. Then there are the craftsman, the master--these are the stages of mastery. Then there is the art stage. But there is beyond the art stage. This is the witchcraft stage. A sort of magic. It's a question of charisma and all sorts of other things."
It may also have been that Rukshin was more driven than any coach before or since. He did some research work in mathematics, but mathematics seemed to be almost a sideline of his life's work: creating world-class mathematics competitiors. That kind of single-minded passion can look and feel very much like magic.
Magicians need willing, impressionalbe subjects to work theri craft.
P 37 A beautiful School
Whatever the reason, his not being a part of the military effort left Kolmogorov free to devote his considerable energies to creating the world ofr mathematicians that he had envisioned since he was a young man. Kolmogorov and Alexandrov both hailed from Luzitania, Luzin's magic land of mathematics, and they sought to re-create it at their dacha(俄国的乡间邸宅) outside of Moscow, where they would invite their students for days of walking, cross--country skiing, Listening to music, and discussing their mathematical projects.
(dacha This involved a retreat to a country dacha or secluded library, there to write or grow vegetables and be isolated from the world beyond.追求自由的人逃离到远离都市的乡村别墅或隐秘的图书馆，在那里写作、种菜与世隔绝。)
"The way our graduate group interacted with Kolmogorov was almost classically Greek, " said one of the countless memoirs published by his students; Virtually everyone who had contact with Kolmogorov seemed to have been moved to write about him. 'Through the woods or along the shore of the Klyazma River the muscular mathematician would be moving brisky, on foot or on skis, surrounded by young people. The shy students would be rushing behind him. He talked almost without stopping---although, unlike perhaps the ancient Greeks, he talked less of mathematics and more of other things."
Kolmogorov believed that a mathematician who aspired to greatness had to be well versed in music, the visual arts, and poetry,and --no less important---he had to be sound of body.
The mix of influences that shaped Kolmogorov's idea of a good mathematical education would have been an odd combination anywhere, but in the Soviet Union in the middle of the twentieth century, It was extraordinary almost beyond belief. Kolmogorov haided from a wealthy Russian family that founded a school of its own in Yaroslavl.......
In 1922, Kolmogorov---nineteen, a student at Moscow University, and already an emerging mathematician in his own right---started teaching mathematics at an experimental school in Moscow. Incredibly, the school was modeled after the Dalton School, the famous New York City institution immortalized by, among others, Woody Allen in the film Manhattan. The Dalton Plan, which lay at the foundatin of both the Dalton School and the Potylikha Exempary Experimental School where Kolmogorov taught, called for an individual insturction plan for every student. Each child would map out his own path for the month and proceed to work independently. So every student spent of his school time at his desk, or going to the small school libraries to get a book, or writing something." Kolmogorov recalled in his final interview. "The instructor would be sitting in the corner, reading, and the students would approach him in turn to show what they ahd done." This might have been the first sighting of the figure of the insturctor reading quietly behnd his desk; decades later, the math-club coach would take up this position.
P39
Before the Iron Curtain sealed off the Soviet Union from the rest of the world, Kolmogorov and Alexandrov had done some traveling.......They imported all they could: books, music, ideas. "Interestin that this idea of a truly beloved friend seems to be purely Aryan: The Greeks and the Bermans seem always to have had it ." Alexandrov wrote to Kolgorov in 1931, a few years before the reference to Aryans would have had a different connotation. "The theory of a lone friend is a difficult to fulfill in the contemporary world. " Kolmogorov lamented in response. "The wife will always have pretensions to that role,but it would be too sad to consent to this . In Aristotle's times, these two sides of the issue never came into contact: the wife was one thing, and the friend quite another. "
Kolmogorov brought back from Germany collections of verse by Goethe, who would always be his favorite poet. In all their letters to each other, Kolmogorov and Alexandrov incleded detailed reports of concerts attended and music heard, and when vinyl record became available, they started collectiing them. ALexandrov hosted weekily classic-music evenings at the university; he would play records and lecture on the music and the composers; ater Alexandrov's death, Kolmogorov---already nearing eighty and crippled by Parkinson's disease---took over as host.
Classical music and male bonding, mathematics and sports, poetry and ideas added up to Kolgorov's vision of the ideal man and the ideal school.
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-51886-418839.html
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