Century Mathematics
PREFACE Let me enlist the reasons, why a professional Mathematician, like I am, who is expected to be thinking and writing only on the topics of Mathematics, decided to write the articles of this collection. Around 20 years ago three events happened almost simultaneously. It all started with Russian Academy of Sciences at some point deciding to collect and publish articles on major events In Mathematics during the XXth century. Among others, I too was invited to contribute to that collection, and one of the editors of that publication, Yakov Sinai, suggested that I write for it also about the phenomenon of migration of significant part of Russian (the Soviet) Mathematics to Israel. I had written such an article, and it was published in that collection (Phasis, Moscow, 2003, and English translation by Springer-Phasis, 2005). Now, in present collection this piece of that article makes the first one. The outcome of that publication was not anything that I had expected: many both wrote to me and told me personally that the article was very well written, and that it had made a very interesting read. (Such was the reaction to Russian version, which I include here; I think that English translation with its formal tone was not much of a success.) The second trigger was that by a strange coincidence at the same time I came across three essays by William Somerset Maugham ("Yesterday I turned 70...", " Looking Back on Eighty Years..." and then "On My Ninetieth Birthday…”). It was quite an observation, the transformation of human approach to life, as the age of this human advances.
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