Alexander Esenin-Volpin
Alexander Esenin-Volpin | |
---|---|
Александр Сергеевич Есенин-Вольпин | |
Born | Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin May 12, 1924 USSR |
Died | March 16, 2016 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. | (aged 91)
Nationality | Russian |
Citizenship | Soviet Union, United States |
Alma mater | Moscow State University |
Occupation(s) | Soviet mathematician, human rights activist, dissident, poet |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Boston University |
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (also written Ésénine-Volpine and Yessenin-Volpin in his French and English publications; Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Есе́нин-Во́льпин; May 12, 1924 – March 16, 2016) was a Russian-American poet and mathematician.
A dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of six years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in psikhushkas and exile.[1][2] In mathematics, he is known for his foundational role in ultrafinitism.
Life
Alexander Volpin was born on May 12, 1924, in the Soviet Union. His mother, Nadezhda Volpin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father was Sergei Yesenin,[3]: 221 a celebrated Russian poet, who never knew his son. Alexander and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933.
His first psychiatric imprisonments took place in 1949[4]: 20 for "anti-Soviet poetry", in 1959 for smuggling abroad samizdat, including his Свободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), and again in 1968.
Esenin-Volpin graduated from
Apprehensive about the prospect of prison and labor camp, Volpin faked a suicide attempt in order to initiate a psychiatric evaluation.[6]: 119–21 Psychiatrists at Moscow's Serbsky Institute declared Volpin mentally incompetent, and in October 1949 he was transferred to the Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital for an indefinite stay. A year later he was abruptly released from the prison hospital, and sentenced to five years exile in the Kazakh town of Karaganda as a "socially dangerous element." In Karagada, he found employment as a teacher of evening and correspondence courses in mathematics.
In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, Volpin was released due to a general amnesty. Soon he became a known mathematician specializing in the fields of ultrafinitism and intuitionism.
The Glasnost demonstration
In 1965, Esenin-Volpin organized a legendary "
The meeting was attended by about 200 people, many of whom turned out to be KGB operatives. The slogans read: "Требуем гласности суда над Синявским и Даниэлем" (We demand an open trial for Sinyavski and Daniel) and "Уважайте советскую конституцию" (Respect the Soviet constitution).[7] The demonstrators were promptly arrested.
[Volpin] would explain to anyone who cared to listen a simple but unfamiliar idea: all laws ought to be understood in exactly the way they are written and not as they are interpreted by the government and the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter [...]. What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.
Fellow dissident and human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva on the approach spearheaded by Esenin-Volpin[8]: 275
In the following years, Esenin-Volpin became an important voice in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. He was one of the first
After his 1968 psychiatric confinement, 99 Soviet mathematicians sent a letter to the Soviet authorities asking for his release.[10] This fact became public and the Voice of America conducted a broadcast on the topic; Esenin-Volpin was released almost immediately thereafter.[3]: 221 Vladimir Bukovsky was quoted as saying that Volpin's diagnosis was "pathological honesty".[11]
In 1968, Esenin-Volpin circulated his famous "Памятка для тех, кому предстоят допросы" (Memo for those who expect to be interrogated) widely used by fellow dissidents.[12]
In 1969, he signed the first Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights, drafted by the
Emigration
In May 1972, he emigrated to the United States, but his Soviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time. He worked at Boston University. In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.[14]
Abroad he again alarmed the Soviet authorities in 1977 by threatening to sue them for spreading rumours that he was mentally ill.[15]
In 2005, Esenin-Volpin participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.
He died on March 16, 2016, aged 91.[16][17]
Mathematical work
I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of “points” of that length. There is the obvious “draw the line” objection, asking where in 21, 22, 23, … , 2100 do we stop having “Platonistic reality”? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 21 and asked him whether this is “real” or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 22, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 23, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2100 times as long to answer yes to 2100 then he would to answering 21. There is no way that I could get very far with this.
Harvey M. Friedman, "Philosophical Problems in Logic"
His early work was in general topology, where he introduced Esenin-Volpin's theorem. Most of his later work was on the foundations of mathematics, where he introduced ultrafinitism, an extreme form of constructive mathematics that casts doubt on the existence of not only infinite sets, but even of large integers such as 1012. He sketched a program for proving the consistency of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory using ultrafinitistic techniques in (Ésénine-Volpine 1961), (Yessenin-Volpin 1970) and (Yessenin-Volpin 1981).
Mathematical publications
- Ésénine-Volpine, A. S. (1961), "Le programme ultra-intuitionniste des fondements des mathématiques", Infinitistic Methods (Proc. Sympos. Foundations of Math., Warsaw, 1959), Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 201–223, S2CID 117082459
- Yessenin-Volpin, A. S. (1970), "The ultra-intuitionistic criticism and the antitraditional program for foundations of mathematics", in Kino, A.; Myhill, J.; Vesley, R. E. (eds.), Intuitionism and proof theory (Proc. Conf., Buffalo, N.Y., 1968), Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 3–45, JSTOR 2272294
- Yessenin-Volpin, A. S. (1981), "About infinity, finiteness and finitization (in connection with the foundations of mathematics)", in Richman, Fred (ed.), Constructive mathematics (Las Cruces, N.M., 1980), Lecture Notes in Math., vol. 873, Berlin-New York: Springer, pp. 274–313, MR 0644507
References
- ^ Документы Инициативной группы по защите прав человека в СССР
- ^ Александр Есенин-Вольпин - биография и семья
- ^ ISBN 0-8218-9003-4.
- ISBN 0-415-32369-X. Archivedfrom the original on 2016-05-11.
- S2CID 159974080. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2015-09-07.
- ^ Irina Kirk, Profiles in Russian Resistance (New York, 1975)
- ^ (in Russian) Text Archived 2005-10-27 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 0-8195-6176-2.
- ^ A Chronicle of Current Events (1.3, item 2), 30 April 1968, "Repressive measures". Archived 15 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ (in Russian) Text of the letter Archived 2014-02-26 at the Wayback Machine. math.ru. Retrieved 21 February 2014.
- ^ "NRS | Kayak Gear, Raft Supplies, SUPs & Boating Equipment". Archived from the original on 2005-02-18.
- ^ (in Russian) Text Archived 2010-05-26 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Yakobson, Anatoly; Yakir, Pyotr; Khodorovich, Tatyana; Podyapolskiy, Gregory; Maltsev, Yuri; et al. (21 August 1969). "An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 7 October 2015.
- ^ "Humanist Manifesto II". American Humanist Association. Archived from the original on October 20, 2012. Retrieved October 9, 2012.
- ^ The Bukovsky Archives, 26 January 1977 (St 42/18). Archived 13 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, Prominent Soviet-Era Dissident, Dies Aged 91". RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. 2016-03-16. Archived from the original on 2016-03-16. Retrieved 2016-03-17.
- ^ "Early Soviet dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin dies at 91". GlobalPost. Agence France-Presse. Archived from the original on 2016-03-24. Retrieved 2016-03-17.
Further reading
- Nathans, Benjamin (2006). Alexander Volpin and the origins of the Soviet human rights movement. Washington, D.C.: National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. OCLC 213361100.
- Nathans, Benjamin (Winter 2007). "The dictatorship of reason: Aleksandr Vol'pin and the idea of rights under "developed socialism"" (PDF). Slavic Review. 66 (4): 630–663. S2CID 159974080. Archived from the original(PDF) on 7 September 2015.
External links
- Great Russian Poet's Son Comes Home at MN
- Turzański, Marian (1992). "Strong sequences, binary families and Esenin-Volpin's theorem". Commentationes Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinae. 33 (3): 563–569. MR 1209298.
- Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia, ISBN 0-415-33320-2; pp. 55, 85, 155
- Russian language links
- Bio & Bibliography
- Bio & writings at Anthology of Samizdat
- Poetry
- "Интервью с философом Александром Есениным-Вольпиным и его ученицей Кристор Хенникс". Radio Liberty. 11 July 2007. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
- "Александр Есенин-Вольпин". Радио Свобода. Radio Liberty. 18 February 2005. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
- "Александр Есенин-Вольпин". Радио Свобода. Radio Liberty. 12 May 2004. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
- "Памятка для не ожидающих допроса: Беседа с Александром Есениным-Вольпиным от 4 декабря 1998 года". Неприкосновенный запас. 1 (21). 2002. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
Audio-visual material
- "Alexander Esenin-Volpin interview June 29, 1982". 29 June 1982.
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