A Long Time Ago in a Far Away Land

Winter Mathematics School, 1981 (?), somewhere in the woods of Urals. I was a director of WMS for 10 years (1977-86). Notice the wool boots, valenki, by the wall. Apart from candlelight dinners and cross-country skiing, we had lots of math lectures, including some by a future Fields medalist Efim Zelmanov (bottom right photo), now at UC San Diego.

The first WMS was organized by Yuri Gurevich, now at Microsoft Research. People who attended the schools were mostly undergraduate students of the Ural State University. Now they are working for companies like Motorolla, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and so on. Many have left Russia.

Many thanks to Alla Kvetnaya (she is with a guitar on the second photo on the left and without a guitar on the top left photo) for sending me these two pictures. The second guy on both these photos is Vlad Lekhtik. We edited two newspapers together: "Sachkodav" (in Kolhoz) and "Zima i Shkola"(in WMS). It is interesting that the second title is as difficult to translate into English as the first one.

Below is a photo from Kolhoz 1980 (?) (singing songs by Okudzhava and others). The girls on this photo are first year students of the Ural State University sent to the collective farm to pick potatoes (the farmers were too few and too drunk to do that by themselves).


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