Mark Vygodsky: several episodes from the life of a scholar

Abstract

The subject of this paper is Mark Vygodsky, a prominent Soviet mathematician, one of the founders of the Soviet school of the history of mathematics. The paper draws on Vygodsky's surviving archive to develop a better understanding of how the life of a scholar unfolded within the context of Soviet reality. Discussion in the paper is confined to several episodes connected with Vygodsky's work as the author of books for secondary school students and as a mathematics teacher educator. It is argued that an examination of these episodes adds to the existing picture of the time when they took place, by shedding light not only on the significance of the political in a field seemingly distant from politics, but also on the position of the mathematics community and of people interested in mathematics education in general.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his gratitude to V M Busev, who directed his attention to the articles of Novoselov and Markushevich, which served as the impetus for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ His name was transliterated in Latin characters both as Wygoskii and Vygodskii.

² All translations from Russian are by the author unless otherwise noted.

³ Actually, this book was written by S Ya Lurie's son, the historian Ya S Lurie, but due to censorship the first edition was published outside Russia and under the name of S Ya Lurie's already deceased sister.

⁴ The life of K A Rumyantsev is the subject of studies by Kiselev (1966) and Rakhmankulov et al. (2006). His activities in Rostov are not addressed in these works, however, nor in other sources on the history of the Civil War that are known to us, including the book by Murphy (2005) largely devoted to the red underground on the Don.

⁵ It should be noted that the OSVAG clearly had a policy against hiring Jews (Sokolov 1921), which casts doubt on the importance of Vygodsky's position there.

⁶ Demidov et al. (2015) note that he also taught stenography there. See Vygodsky 1923.

⁷ In the USSR, each college had its own entrance examinations, based on which students were chosen for admission. Not all students had to take examinations in mathematics, but only those entering fields of study that required mathematics (for example, technical engineering professions). Although all exam problems formally had to be chosen in accordance with a single common nationwide school programme, they varied quite substantially both in terms of style and in terms of their level of difficulty, often differing considerably from the problems that students were assigned and solved in school. Consequently, handbooks for students entering colleges were sold in enormous quantities.

⁸ Golubev knew of Novoselov's article and raised objections to it directly in his text.

⁹ ‘My dear, kind, and honest Mark… your letter, I must admit, touched me greatly with its truly knightly honesty’, Sofya Yanovskaya, one of the founders of the Soviet school of mathematics history and the philosophy of mathematics, wrote to him already in 1959 (Yanovskaya 1959).