The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer Read Free Book Online Page A

culture obsessed with abstraction, I even ended up marrying into it.
    Yes, I have, with one exception, avoided any discussion of my own relationships, past and present. I certainly haven’t forgotten about them, especially my life with my ex. You don’t forget even two years of marriage. In my August years, my memories of that time are, strangely, far more vivid than they were thirty years ago. Oh Catherine. Perhaps you will pick up this book if only to see where you are mentioned. Here. This is the first real time. Catherine. Scan this text and find your name. You were my first, and for many years I thought you’d be my only, true romantic love.
    Seven days in a house full of mathematicians who would pry up floorboards looking for hidden notes. Seven days with a father who had a difficult time forgiving me for abandoning what he worked so hard to train me to do. I wished out of both selfishness, so I could have avoided these days, and of course out of love, that my mother had proven to be immortal.

CHAPTER 6
When Someone Famous Dies
    M y mother’s mentor, the great Kolmogorov, died in Moscow in 1987. Of course, the Russians, out of spite, denied my mother’s request to attend the funeral. Whenever her name was mentioned in official Russian publications prior to 1989, they either pretended her career as a mathematician abruptly ended for no apparent reason in 1951 or simply made note of her first position after defecting, a lectureship at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. To someone in the West, this mention of her work in Germany would not be understood as anything out of the ordinary. But for a Russian it was an obvious and telltale slur. My mother was the lowest of the low, someone who abandoned communism and allied herself with Russia’s truly worst and most vile enemy, the German Republic.
    The rejection of my mother’s request actually was, in hindsight, of no consequence. It was foggy in Moscow around the time of Kolmogorov’s funeral, so foggy that planes could not land. My mother would probably have missed the event even if she had tried to attend. But she heard, of course, what had transpired. People came when they could by train, and the initial crowd, already large, eventually became an unmanageable sea of mathematicians, Soviet apparatchiks, and admirers not simply of the mathematical mind of Kolmogorov, but of his amazing political skill. How on earth did he, of all people, manage to avoid being exiled or worse during the bleak days of the 1950s, when anyone with any intellect was automatically targeted as an Enemy of the People?
    Even Premier Gorbachev, fancying himself a bit of an intellectual, attended and spoke at this event. One could say without much distortion and hyperbole that Kolmogorov represented the best of what the USSR could offer both as an intellectual and as a citizen who profoundly shaped Russian education. A bastard son of humble beginnings who was nurtured with care by the Soviet system and gave so much back in return out of gratitude, it was perhaps to be expected that since his youth coincided with the rise of communism, his death would essentially be aligned with its collapse.
    America obviously is not Russia. Mathematics does not hold any magnetic appeal. No, here it is strictly billionaires, football players, and movie stars who are of interest to the public. Certainly President Clinton, who had in 1993 awarded my mother a National Medal of Science for her achievements, was not going to attend her funeral in a Midwestern state where he knew his token presence would give Democrats no political advantage. He had other things on his mind, no doubt.
    Besides, according to my mother, they had had an odd exchange at the medal ceremony. She was waiting in line in the Rose Room of the White House next to someone who had discovered, among other things, a new comet. Clinton chatted amiably with “Mr. Comet Man,” giving him a big frat-brother pat on the back as he complimented him