Word: kazhdan
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...pages, which according to Artin, is unusually concise for a through mathematical proof. As a result the mathematicians had to go back to Faltings' original sources to double check the professor's work. But after the meetings, all the mathematicians agreed that Faltings' work is "strikingly foolproof." David Kazhdan, Professor of Mathematics said last week...
...contrast, Joseph Bernstein and David Kazhdan, two Jewish Soviet mathematicians now tenured here, were invited and heavily recruited. The department recruited both professors "because they were the best people around," Mathematics Department Chairman David Mumford says. Bernstein, who was sought by several other universities, chose Harvard this spring because of his friendship with Kazhdan, who had come to the University...
Though anti-Semitism and other political considerations kept both Kazhdan and Bernstein from any status higher than researcher in the Soviet Union--Kazhdan says he "didn't even try" to become a professor in a Russian university--both had already achieved international academic recognition through their publications. Attaining such recognition may be easier for mathematicians than for scholars is other fields, Kazhdan speculates, because mathematics "depends less than any other on language and technology." About 100 Soviet refugees are affiliated with math departments in various American universities, he notes...
...linguistic and cultural gap does cause problems in other areas, however Kazhdan notes, for example, that despite the substantial Soviet population at Harvard, the area lacks a strong refugee community. Mark Kuchnent, a Russian Jew who is currently a researcher in Soviet science and policy at the Russian Research Center, concurs that "there is no organized Soviet community of immigrants." Harvard does, however, have a comparatively large foreign community because dissidents tend to emigrate to large cities such as New York or Boston, although "there's no rhyme or reason to which university gets people," according to Jonathan Sanders, assistant...
...Soviets allow mathematicians of such caliber to go seems rather odd, especially in light of their fixation with mathematical and technical expertise. Nathanson guesses that it has to do with the fact that scholars like Bernstein and Kazhdan work in pure mathematics which, unlike applied math, has no immediate use for developing weapons and technology. "These people tend to be short-sighted," he says, adding that losing such mathematicians could come back to haunt the Soviets in the long-term...