MOSCOW ADVENTURES,
1988–89
December
2007
I
spent many years learning Russian (a few other languages, too, but mainly
Russian), and it had always been my ambition to go where everybody speaks
Russian as a matter of course. Nearly three decades after I began studying
Russian, I finally realized this ambition. With support from the Fulbright 
Program and the
International Research and Exchanges Board, I arrived in Moscow on December 1,
1988, to work at the Institute for the History of Natural Science and
Technology at 1/5 Staropansky Prospekt (a few blocks from the Kremlin). The
picture of me on the left was taken by the newspaper Leninskoe Znamya (The Lenin
Banner), whose reporter, Nikolai Modestov, interviewed me while I was there.
I spent a happy two months, giving one lecture at Moscow University and one at
the Institute itself. The people there, though most of them were Communists,
were wonderful to me, and I regret that too many of them have died. I liked and
admired Adol'f Pavlovich Yushkevich (1906–1993) and Fyodor Andreevich Medvedev
(1922–1992), as well as Konstantin Alekseevich Rybnikov (1913–2004). One
special pleasure was having Sunday brunch in the University apartment of Boris
Vladimirovich Gnedenko (1912–1993), whose textbook of probability theory I had
purchased as an undergraduate. (He and I agreed that undergraduate education in
both our countries was going to hell in a handbasket.) Most of all I treasure
the friendship of Sergei Sergeevich Demidov, who exhibited superhuman energy in
holding the Section of Mathematics at the Institute together during the
difficult post-soviet years.
Sergei
and I shared an adventure one snowy Sunday evening in Moscow. After stopping at
a restaurant (apparently run by the Academy of Sciences for its members-I never
understood these things) for a snack and a beer, we entered the Metro and were
stopped by a militsioner (police officer). Looking back on it, I
realize the consequences could have been unpleasant. I'm not sure just what I'm
officially allowed to do (this is still the Soviet era). My Frostline jacket
and galoshes mark me as the obvious foreigner. The accusation, however, was
against Sergei, who was told he was drunk (which was decidedly not true). With
my American instincts, I thought humility would be in order when dealing with
the Russian police. Sergei, the native Muscovite, knew better. He grew
indignant and told the policeman that his colleague Dr. Cooke from America,
could vouch for his sobriety. In my bookish Russian, which always amused my
Russian colleagues, as if someone you met on the street spoke like Nicholas
Nickleby, I said, “I, of course, can testify that he is in a sober
condition." The militsioner decided,
upon hearing this, that he wouldn't detain us. I had to have it all explained
to me later. According to Sergei, the policeman was just fulfilling the plan he
has to file every year, telling how many drunks he expects to keep out of the
Metro in the next twelve months. Normally, said Sergei, he would not have argued
with the policeman, but knowing that I had an American passport in my pocket,
he was emboldened to put up some resistance. I didn't tell him that that was
the one time I had left the hotel without my passport. Since then Sergei has
visited me in my home in Vermont, and I have published two Russian articles in Istoriko-matematicheskie
Issledovaniya (Historico-mathematical Research).
It was a great
thrill to be able to look at the actual notebooks of Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin (1883–1950). The stuff that never got
published—
Luzin's attempts to
prove the continuum hypothesis and his speculation on the proper role of the
axiom of choice in mathematics—was fascinating. Here's a picture of Luzin
(reproduced with the kind permission of the MacTutor Archive), in case you don't have time to go to the hyperlink I just put
in.
After my retirement in 2003, I knew I
wouldn’t be working up the Luzin notebooks properly. In 2005, I sent them to Loren Graham and
Jean-Michel Kantor, who have peformed the miraculous feat of bringing some
order into them, putting Luzin’s seemingly random notes into the context of his
life and work. Their work is soon to
appear in print, and I look forward eagerly to reading it.