{"id":91891,"date":"2024-10-13T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2024-10-13T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=91891"},"modified":"2024-10-12T18:15:20","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T22:15:20","slug":"the-soviet-unions-surplus-of-math-nerds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/10\/13\/the-soviet-unions-surplus-of-math-nerds\/","title":{"rendered":"The Soviet Union’s surplus of math nerds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most recent review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf<\/em><\/a> is John Psmith’s musings on Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers<\/em> by Alexander Zvonkin, and he starts by talking about something the Soviets did better than the west:<\/p>\n

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To me, one of the greatest historical puzzles is why the Cold War was even a contest. Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question<\/a>: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. (I examined this question at some length in this review<\/a>.) Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1<\/sup> with the United States for so long?<\/p>\n

The puzzle was partly solved for me, but partly deepened, when those of us who grew up in the \u201890s and \u201800s encountered the vast wave of former Soviet \u00e9migr\u00e9s<\/em> that washed up in the United States after the fall of communism. Anybody who played competitive chess back then, or who participated in math competitions, knows what I’m talking about: the sinking feeling you got upon seeing that your opponent had a Russian name. These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations \u2014 the Russians were punching way above their weight, demographically speaking. Today, those same Russians are all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Ivy League math departments, still overrepresented in technical fields. What explains it? Are Russians just naturally better at math and physics?<\/p>\n

When I related these questions to an Ashkenazi-supremacist friend of mine, he immediately suggested that “maybe it’s because they’re all Jewish”. (I’ve noticed that the most philosemitic people and the most antisemitic people sometimes have curiously similar models of the world, they just disagree on whether it’s a good thing.) My friend’s question wasn’t crazy, since there are definitely times when asking “were they all Jewish?” yields an affirmative answer<\/a>. But in this case I had to disappoint him with the knowledge that many of these Russian math and chess superstars were gentiles.2<\/sup> What’s more, by the ’60s and ’70s the Soviets had an entire discriminatory apparatus<\/a> dedicated to keeping Jews out of the scientific establishment, so it would be impressive indeed if they were the foundation of its success.<\/p>\n

Another possible explanation actually hinges on the relative poverty of the Soviet Union. Assume there are a lot of people out there with natural mathematical talent, but who given their druthers would major in underwater basket-weaving instead. The United States, because it’s so wealthy, can afford to “waste” a huge proportion of our talented population on humanities, arts, and other stuff that doesn’t involve you sitting in the school library until 3am. In other words, not<\/em> going into a technical field is a form of luxury, which America can afford to consume. The Soviets, rather like the Chinese today, were forced by their underdog status to allocate human capital more efficiently (and had the authoritarian means to do so by force if necessary). This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science<\/a> \u2014 which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.<\/p>\n

The thing is, the \u00e9migr\u00e9<\/em> superstars I encountered didn’t seem at all grudging or resentful about their studies. If anything it was the opposite. I’ve previously complained<\/a> about how much I hate Russian mathematician Edward Frenkel’s3<\/sup> book, but one thing it gets across well is just how important passion is to being a great mathematician, and passion was the thing the \u00e9migr\u00e9s<\/em> seemed to have a surfeit of. In college, the joke was that seminars by American professors would last an hour, whereas seminars by Russian professors would turn into boisterous debates lasting all night. People have been writing for centuries about Russians having a tendency towards “maximalism” \u2014 whether aesthetic or ideological or anything else. Maybe a culture-wide commitment to not doing anything by half-measures explains it?<\/p>\n

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