Yesterday and Long Ago

ISBN-13: 9783540287346 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 230 str.

Vladimir I. Arnold; Leonora P. Kotova; Owen L. deLange

Opis

History is not what we were wearing, It is how we had been utterly ruined. B.Pasternak. Spektorsky In the spring of 1999 the police found me lying unconscious with a broken forehead next to my bike in the outskirts of Paris, and delivered me to a hospital. It took a few weeks for French doctors to bring me to consciousness. But I did not recognize my son and said about my wife: this woman says that she is my wife . A doctor asked me how many years we had been married. I answered correctly, twenty four, and the doctor wrote down: arithmetical abilities are preserved . Later, French doctors told me that with such a trauma any Frenchman would succumb immediately. But then they added: Russians are very tough so you should live several months more . In a Western textbook I had read regarding effects of poisons: as for alcohol the lethal dose for Russians is several times higher . Perhaps the same applies to traumas."

Spis treści

Preface.- My first recollections.- The North-West direction.- Vera Stepanovna Arnold (née Zhitkova).- First scientific reminiscences.- The Arnold family.-A household library.- The axiomatic method.- The color of a meridian.- School years.- It is not easy to keep a secret.- The temple of science.- Who is the winner?- State examination on Marxism.- Goodwill.- The thermal conductivity equation.- Lavoisier and French mathematics during the Revolution.- Queen Eleanor, Rosamund, and labyrinth theory.- Place de Vogueses.- 'Champel Sea'.- Neutrinos, neutrons, and Bruno Pontecorvo.- From Pareto to Arzamas.- How to distinguish good and bad mathematical works.- The combinatorics of Plutarch.- Galilei.- The topology of surfaces according to Alexander of Macedon.- Snake-hunting.- Suputinskii nature reserve.- Pheasants of the Vincent forest.- The guillotine and Marie-Antoinette.- Damiens’s sufferings.- Queen Marguerite and the kingdom of law.- Jeanne d’Arc as a witch and as a saint.- Ravailliac, French cuisine, and traffic jams.- Anne Yaroslavna, Princess of Russia.- Gennady of Novgorod and education in Russia under Ivan III.- Catherine I and the Prut river campaign.- Catherine II and I.I.Betskoi.- An order of Catherine II.- Radishchev.- The Crimean war.- Princess Dashkova and parachutes.- The desecrated host and abstract algebra.- France – Guinea – India.- Julius Caesar and Gallians: protecting Rome from Germans.- A planning department.- Mountain lions over Stanford.- The Pocha river and the dog Shnura.- Hong Kong.- The Pongoma river and the Solovetskie islands.- Brazilian tours.- Leibnitz as Bourbaki’s predecessor.- The 'Mistral' in the 'Crown'.- How academicians were elected and eliminated.- From the history of French economy.- The origins of mathematics: from Greece to Egypt.- Motivation for mathematical education in Israel.- Struggles against foreigners and their languages.- 'Our Manchuria'.- Religion and science, Martin Luther and anti-semitism.- Ramanujan andHardy.- Catching a pike in Cambridge.- Locust swarming and relocation of deer.- Tamil Tigers at the Swiss consulate in Paris.- Picking cranberries.- The Yamal peninsula and digging caves in the snow.- Brain tomography, geometry, and algebra.- Inedible hares.- A question about the bitch of Rabinovitch.- The cemetery at Aksin’ino

Blurb

This charming book by one of the leading mathematicians of our day, Vladimir Igorevich Arnold, is a rambling collection of his memories from early childhood up to recent days. Some marvellous historical and geographical stories occupy a large part of the book. Their characteristic lively style draws the reader into the past as though it were happening today.

The book will be of value to historians of twentieth-century mathematics as source material, and mathematicians will read it for the pure pleasure of learning more about one of their most eminent colleagues. It has both humor and pathos, and even a non-mathematical reader will find it very difficult to put it away.