Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya

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Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya , also Bella Muchnik, ( Russian Белла Абрамовна Субботовская ; English transcription Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya; * December 17, 1937 ; † September 23, 1982 in Moscow ) was a Russian mathematician and founder of a Jewish underground university  .

biography

Subbotovskaya took an early interest in mathematics and, when this was more possible for Jews in the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev era in the 1950s, studied at Lomonossow University , where she also received her doctorate. She then worked as a programmer and published works in mathematical logic and numerical mathematics. She also taught mathematics on a wide variety of levels, for example she designed mathematical games for children or taught at night schools.

She had been married to the future computer science professor at Rutgers University Ilya Muchnik since 1961 and published for a time under the name Muchnik, but after the divorce she took her original name again. She had a daughter who later lived in the United States. Subbotovskaya played the viola in the chamber orchestra of Lomonosov University until her death.

University of the Jewish People

In the Brezhnev era from the 1970s, the tide turned again for Jewish math students, triggered also by leaflet campaigns by dissidents in the late 1960s, which was also supported by many mathematicians at Lomonosov University. As a result, at the central training facility for mathematicians, the Mech-Math Faculty of Lomonosov University, a rigorous, harassing oral exam was introduced specifically for Jewish students, designed to target candidates with Jewish names (which previously looked like the same written exam as the remaining candidates must have passed). Some of the questions were deliberately formulated ambiguously or of extraordinary difficulty and the oral exam was extended to 5 to 6 hours - and if that didn't help, there was also an essay in Russian that offered enough leeway for rejection or you simply refused without justification the recording from. These practices were supported by a long-standing anti-Semitic attitude of some of the most influential Soviet mathematicians in Moscow, the reason being given, for example, that the positions of non-Jewish students would be taken away due to a special early talent for mathematics among Jewish students. Complaints against the test results were mostly hopeless. The failed candidates had to study at other, more technical universities in Moscow, for example the University of Oil and Gas or Railway Technology, where only mathematics was taught for engineering, or had to study at such universities in the province (for example in the Urals or in Saratov), ​​where admission was handled less strictly. Access to post-graduate positions was also restricted for Jewish mathematicians, especially if the position required a security clearance. Some able Jewish mathematicians who later made careers in the West often had to work in temporary jobs for years before their exit applications got through.

In this situation, Subbotovskaya founded in 1978 with the mathematics teacher Valeri Senderow what was soon known in underground circles as the University of the Jewish People . Senderow, who taught at the well-known Special School No. 2 in Moscow, had previously statistically examined the unfair official examination practices with his colleague Boris Kanewski and published it in their underground publication Intellectual Genocide , and both Senderow and Subbotowskaya had previously rejected Jewish candidates in the drafting of Advise petitions. Subbotovskaya was the driving force behind the organization of the underground university. She organized courses in higher mathematics first in her own apartment, then in rooms which she could clandestinely requisition through contacts at universities and other public institutions. Later they even had a semi-official status at the Institute for Oil and Gas. The courses, which took place twice a week and also on Saturdays, were organized like a university course with exams and homework. In addition to Senderow and Kanewski, the teachers included Alexander Winogradow, Alexander Shen, Alexei Sossinsky , Michail Marinow, Boris Feigin , Dmitry Fuchs (Subbotowskaya knew him as well as Vinogradow from his student days), Andrei Zelevinsky . On one occasion, John Milnor gave a lecture. Although Subbotovskaya and the other founders kept a strict separation from politics (which is why Alexander Vinogradov left the teaching staff at the beginning), the increasing success despite adverse circumstances was a thorn in the side of official bodies and at the beginning of 1982 the KGB, which had strengthened the university from the beginning the pressure, also observed by informers: Subbotovskaya was summoned for interrogations several times. In the summer of 1982 Senderow and Kanewski, commonly known as dissidents, were arrested. One of the students from the underground university was also arrested. Senderow later received seven years in prison, Kanewski a little over a year. Subbotovskaya was pressured by the KGB to testify against both of them, but refused.

She died under mysterious circumstances in September 1982 when, after visiting her mother at 11 p.m., when there was hardly any traffic in a quiet side street, she was hit by a truck at high speed, which then hit a hit. A second car stopped shortly afterwards and then, after a quick look at the victim, also drove on. A little later an ambulance came and loaded the corpse. It has been suggested that she was killed in a KGB attack. The bus from her chamber orchestra also drove her body to the funeral.

The University of the Jewish People stopped lecturing a few months later. Over the years it had around 350 students, 100 of whom were graduate degrees. Victor Ginzburg was one of the students .

Lectures especially for Jewish students, who were often denied access to higher mathematics education in the 1980s, continued to take place, for example, at the University of Oil and Gas (called Kerosinka).

In 2007 a conference was held at the Technion in Haifa in honor of Subbotovskaya .

literature

  • George Szpiro A mathematical medley - fifty easy pieces on mathematics , American Mathematical Society, also as Bella's secret seminar in mathematics for the weekend , Piper Verlag 2008 (or Mathematischer Cocktail , NZZ Verlag 2008)
  • Alexander Shen Entrance examinations in Mekh-Mat , Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 16, 1994, No. 4
  • Michail Schifman (Editor) You failed your entrance math test, comrade Einstein , World Scientific 2005
  • Anatoli Werschik Admission to the mathematics departments in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s , Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 16, 1994, No. 4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Illustration of the grave , accessed on December 15, 2018
  2. ↑ In particular in 1967 in the Alexander Jessenin-Wolpin affair , but also in 1968 when the CSSR invaded
  3. ↑ According to Anatoli Werschik (in Schifman You failed your math test .. ) this also affected other “nationalities” that were classified as hostile to the Soviet Union (Chinese, Germans, Greeks, Koreans), but never had the same effects as it did with the students “Jewish nationality” , who made up up to a third of the graduates of high schools specializing in mathematics and physics. It was enough if the name sounded Jewish with the addition of the patronymic extension.
  4. ^ In particular, Lev Pontryagin , Iwan Winogradow . Igor Schafarewitsch, who was close to the dissidents, was also criticized in the West in the 1980s and 1990s for anti-Semitic remarks in a book, but officially had much less influence at that time and was not in the Soviet Union through public anti-Semitic remarks before that known. Other leading mathematicians and academics such as Kolmogorov and Israel Gelfand , who was himself a Jew, were known to be more generous in admitting their lectures and seminars to non-enrolled students.
  5. ↑ At the leading universities, including for example that of Novosibirsk, admission was handled just as strictly as at Lomonosov
  6. ^ Reprinted in Shifman (editor) You failed your math test, comrade Einstein , World Scientific 2005
  7. ↑ Mark Saul Kerosinka , Notices AMS, 1999, No. 10
personal data
SURNAME Subbotovskaya, Bella Abramovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Subbotovskaya, Bella Abramovna; Muchnik, Bella; Субботовская, Белла Абрамовна (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian mathematician and dissident
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1937
DATE OF DEATH 23rd September 1982
Place of death Moscow