Abstract
When I moved up to the sixth grade our school No. 215 had already acquired a new building on Zhukovsky Street, and I often covered the distance from home to school on the footboard of a streetcar – this was possible in those times when the old design of that type of transportation was still in use. While turning from Kolokolnaya Street to Marat Street the streetcar slowed down and I jumped off to the cobble stone pavement. The jump had to be done so as not to be run down by a car that might be turning at the same time. A couple of times, when landing after the jump, I scraped my knees though not seriously. But then the dear corner house I lived in was close at hand.
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Notes
- 1.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). For a very long time, even when I grew up, I did not see a single publication by Freud, but, violating the historical course of events in this book, I must inform the reader that at the age of 18 I read the small book by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) in a pre-revolutionary edition which I bought by chance in a second-hand book shop on Middle Avenue, Vasilyevsky Island, next to the 10th Line (each side of a street is called a “Line”). I decided that I belong to the extroverted sensation type. That is why, to help my readers who would like to better understand the psychology of this author, I am presenting here a quotation from Jung: “No other human type can equal the extraverted sensation-type in realism. His sense for objective facts is extraordinarily developed. His life is an accumulation of actual experience with concrete objects, and the more pronounced he is, the less use does he make of his experience. In certain cases the events of his life hardly deserve the name ‘experience’. He knows no better use for this sensed ‘experience’ than to make it serve as a guide to fresh sensations; anything in the least ‘new’ that comes within his circle of interest is forthwith turned to a sensational account and is made to serve this end. In so far as one is disposed to regard a highly developed sense for sheer actuality as very reasonable, will such men be esteemed rational. In reality, however, this is by no means the case, since they are equally subject to the sensation of irrational, chance happenings, as they are to rational behavior.”
- 2.
Both places bore the name of A. A. Zhdanov, a Soviet Communist leader close to Stalin.
- 3.
International and All-Union Olympiads in mathematics were first organized in 1959 and 1967 respectively, long after I had finished school.
- 4.
“Mathmech” an abbreviation of “Department of Mathematics and Mechanics” at the Leningrad University.
- 5.
Grigory Yakovlevich Lozanovsky (1937–1976).
- 6.
Yury Dmitrievich Burago, born in 1936.
- 7.
“Realschule” a German name for schools with emphasis on natural science and mathematics rather than humanities. This type of schools established in Russia in 1872 did not exist in the Soviet Union, the Russian name was “realnoe uchilishche”.
- 8.
G. M. Fichtenholz (1988–1959) was the founder of the Leningrad school of the theory of functions of a real variable.
- 9.
I. Polyak, On anti-Semitism in Soviet science, http://www.proza.ru/2003/12/24/97
- 10.
A. G. Pinsker (1905–1986). In mathematics a functional is a map of a set of certain objects into a set of numbers.
- 11.
He knew English marvelously, but did not have a higher education diploma. That situation did not prevent him from being hired to teach at a high school because there was a shortage of teachers, and life had not yet become controlled by the bureaucrats as much as in later years.
- 12.
I never asked him if that was true and thus did not know; Y. B. Golitsynsky’s ancestor could actually have been a serf belonging to Golitsyn princes.
- 13.
A familiar diminutive of Arkady.
- 14.
“Baltflot” a Russian abbreviation of “Baltic Fleet”. Major military and naval units had their own theaters.
- 15.
Muslim Magomaev (1942–2008). A tenor very famous in the Soviet Union.
- 16.
Mordovia, a so-called “autonomous” republic with some political prisoner camps.
- 17.
Arkady Alexeev – author of the historical novel “The Adventures of Giulio Mazarini” in four volumes. Now he is finishing a book on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette (V. M.).
- 18.
Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963). See the book by V. G. Maz’ya and T.O. Shaposhnikova “Jacques Hadamard, a Universal Mathematician”, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 1998 (V. M.).
- 19.
At that time I did not have a typewriter, but there was, at the Mathmech, a wonderful typist Nina Ivanovna, who, almost for free, typed mathematical manuscripts. The author had just to insert the formulas with Indian ink (V. M.).
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Maz’ya, V. (2014). High School Life. In: Differential Equations of My Young Years. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01809-6_3
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