Creative Discomfort: The Culture of the Gelfand Seminar at Moscow University
Israel Gelfand's weekly seminar at Moscow State University, which ran continuously from 1943 to 1989, has gained a legendary status in the Russian mathematics community. It evokes a mixture of admiration and revulsion. Did the style of the seminar merely reflect the eccentric personality of its leader, or did it indicate some broader cultural patterns? Did the seminar thrive despite its offensive style, or was the style part of the enigma? How does today's perspective of the memoirists differ from the contemporary perceptions of the seminar? To start answering these questions, we will place the Gelfand seminar in the social context of postwar Soviet mathematics.