The Kitchen and the Dacha: Productive Spaces of Soviet Mathematics
In the late 1960s and 70s, due to the Soviet regime’s crackdown on dissident activities and rising anti-Semitic policies, many mathematicians from “undesirable” groups faced discrimination and serious administrative restrictions on work and study at top-ranking official institutions. To overcome su...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences
2024-09-01
|
| Series: | Studia Historiae Scientiarum |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ojs.ejournals.eu/SHS/article/view/9573 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | In the late 1960s and 70s, due to the Soviet regime’s crackdown on dissident activities and rising anti-Semitic policies, many mathematicians from “undesirable” groups faced discrimination and serious administrative restrictions on work and study at top-ranking official institutions. To overcome such barriers, the mathematical community built extensive social networks around informal or semi-formal study groups and seminars, which formed a parallel social infrastructure for learning and research. As result, mathematical activity began shifting from public educational and research institutions into private or semi-private settings — family apartments, summer dachas, and countryside walks. For many Soviet mathematicians, instead of being a refuge from work, their home apartments and dachas became their primary working spaces — places where they did their research, met with students, and exchanged ideas with colleagues. At the intersection of work and private life, a tightly knit mathematical community emerged, whose commitment to scholarship went beyond formal duty or required curriculum, a community practicing mathematics as a “way of life.” The parallel social infrastructure functioned in tense interdependency with official institutions and borrowed some characteristics of the official system it opposed.
|
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2451-3202 2543-702X |