Run, Perelman, run

Masha Gessen - Liberal Liberallych, the main Snob and Global Russian - wrote a book about mathematics Perelman, which two years ago was famous for the abandonment of several prestigious mathematical awards, who considered him evidence of the Poincare hip.

The fact that strawberries grew in the USSR is a real miracle! Freedom-loving strawberries simply could not grow in a totalitarian society, and yet it grew. When I first tried strawberries, I immediately realized: this is mine. She was not so much like a dull Soviet reality!

Something like this (only replace the “strawberries” with “mathematics”) This book begins. The book seems to be about mathematical life in the Soviet Union. Well, about Perelman. It seems to be. But in fact - about what Masha Hessen thinks about mathematics in the USSR and Perelman.

There is no dispute, any storytelling is an interpretation, so the question of tendency is the only question about the degree of tendency. Talking to American readers (the book was published two years ago in the States, the current edition - translation) about admission to Soviet universities, we could talk about some discrimination of the Jews upon admission, and that education and housing were free, and the scholarships were enough for food. The question is, what to pay more attention, right? But if for several dozen pages to pedal one topic and not a single word to say about the other, this is not just tendentiousness, but natural lies.

In the Soviet Union, everything was irrational - Hessen does not tire of repeating. All good Soviet mathematicians were Jews. Jews were not accepted into prestigious universities, and they were forced to go to secondary ones. At the same time, Jews were also forbidden to teach in prestigious universities, they taught in secondary ones. Truly, the American reader is dizzy: what is it, he thinks for a prestigious university in which there are no smart teachers or smart students? Ah, yes! - He claps his forehead, - because in the USSR everything was irrational!

The existence of mathematics in the USSR is a miracle, because mathematics is honest and strict science, and in the USSR everything was false and shaky. We note to the side: such an idea - that in the system of a minus A is strange - there is nothing more than “being determines consciousness” in the understanding of a person for whom the vulgar Marxism is an unconscious base of thinking. Mathematics could be escaped from the disgusting system, they left mathematicians alone, gave their own business, gave them apartments and decent content. All this was a miracle. But all the same physics, chemists, actors, writers received the same thing-all-all-all who ran away from the dull late-Soviet reality in their profession. Isn't it too much miracles?

Masha Gessen several times reminds the reader that she is an insider, studied at a mathematical school, went to a mathematical circle. She liked to engage in mathematics, because she allowed her to think freely, but in the USSR it was forbidden. That's a young dissident. So I like ice cream solely because it is the colors of the white movement.

Perhaps Masha Hesse has forgotten from school times, so I remind you: mathematics causes wild aesthetic pleasure, equations and graphs can be rave as music and poems. I say this as a man from the "thirty". In St. Petersburg, two physical schools are “thirty” and “two-three-nine”, their eternal rivalry is a separate topic in school folklore. Grigory Perelman studied at the 239th.

Physics and schools were islands of freedom in the Gulag archipelago. Everyone who came to a physical school felt relieved: finally ended up among his own! Everything is so, only your humble servant experienced the same feeling in 1994, escaping from the cattle school on the edge of the city - and what does the system have to do with it?

The system watched the freedom -loving mathematicians intensely and, with any convenient opportunity, put them sticks in the wheels. Uh -huh, only in the yard was 1997, when I was kicked out of the tenth grade (and I was not the last in my class) FMG No. 30 with the absurd formulation “For the Spirit of Eleventh Classmates”, and in essence, for not wanting to cut and wrote “strange” writings in literature. And what has to do with it, tell me, the system? The system is in the head. And in Masha Hessen, including.

Involuntarily, Masha Hessen wrote a book that they have Komsomol icons or LGBT movements-they need to run headlong, and this is with any type of socio-economic formation-whether they wear Masha Hessen-whether they wear Komsomol icons or flags.

This is about one half of the book.

The other is dedicated to Perelman. Well, this is really a big journalistic work: dozens of interviews have been carried out, many and many facts have been established about the most mysterious resident of St. Petersburg. However, with facts more carefully: for example, Hesse hastily states that the greatest Soviet mathematician Kolmogorov was a homosexual, not in a word, not to say that this is actually nothing more than her, Hesse, a guess.

However, the opposite has not yet been proven, we will assume that the facts that Masha Hessen reports about Perelman are true. The question is different: does the image of the greatest mathematician of the 21st century make up from these facts? Pathologically honest. Not accepting reality as it is. Asperger suffering from Asperger (a slight form of autism, in short). Nestless nails (even bending), but clean. So he refuses to send a resume to be taken to work at a prestigious American University. Here it throws the CDs transferred from fans to the head of the transmitting. Where is mathematics? Where is the genius? Which of these character traits allowed Perelman to solve the problem, over which generations of researchers fought before it? The fact remains: the law of transition of quantity to quality does not work. Despite the abundance of details, Perelman slipped away from the author, remained not captured. The failure is associated with the main vice of the book: Masha Hessen should be tied to the division of the world into Mordor and Lorien, and she is already under the lack of a science into the essence of the relationship of his hero with science.

Masha Hessen, Perelman refused a million dollars not because he was experiencing a noble aversion to the world in which the collective Masha Hessen runs, but because he is arrogant and touchy. In essence, we are trying to steal our Perelman, to make some kind of Karl Chernomor from our Heracles of the Spirit. The collective Masha Hessen is needed by philistinely explainable, that is, safe. We say the decisive “no” to all these insinuations; We need our Perelman - Perelman, who showed the Kukish the kingdom of capital and spit on his main idol.

While Perelman is alive, he goes in his old jacket for mushrooms, - the morning, fresh, unspoken, the ghouls are asleep, and thank God.