Creative Discomfort: The Culture of the Gelfand Seminar at Moscow University Slava Gerovitch 1 Memory Israel Gelfand’s weekly seminar at Moscow State University, which ran continu- ously from 1943 to 1989, has gained a legendary status in the Russian mathematics community. It has been praised as “maybe the greatest seminar in the history of the Mechanical-Mathematical Faculty of Moscow University,”1 “probably the best seminar in the history of mathematics,”2 and even “one of the most productive seminars in the history of science.”3 According to seminar participants, the seminar “ardently followed all that was new in mathematics anywhere in the world”4 and “made a decisive impact on mathematical life in Moscow.”5 Many outstanding mathematicians remember the seminar fondly as their crucial coming-of-age experience. Before we conjure up an idyllic image of a harmonic chorus of great mathe- maticians conversing magnificently on topics of utmost scholarly importance, let us read a bit more from the memoirs of the same seminar participants. The seminar has 1Tikhomirov (2008), p. 10. 2Interview with Aleksei Sosinskii, 20 October 2009 (http://polit.ru/article/2009/10/20/absossinsky_ about_imgelfand/). 3Tikhomirov (2008), p. 25. 4Landis (2007), p. 69. 5Arnold (2009), p. 40. S. Gerovitch (&) Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, USA e-mail:
[email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 51 B. Larvor (ed.), Mathematical Cultures, Trends in the History of Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28582-5_4