Arrival at apartment and Indep. Univ. of Moscow

I'm in Moscow for the fall semester of 2010, visiting the Independent University of Moscow (henceforth called IUM).  I'll post some interesting pictures of the trip here, with some commentary.

First of all, since a lot of the photos won't have famous backdrops, I might as well start with an image which shows I am in Moscow and not, say, Omsk or Tomsk.  You presumably recognize the red brick fortress behind me in the photo below.  If not, here's a hint: its name rhymes with Kremlin.

OK, all this photo really shows is that either I am in Moscow or someone who looks like me is in Moscow. But he's in California, so the first choice is correct.

I'm starting this blog about a month and a half after I arrived, so it's too annoying to try to set this up as some day-by-day, or even week by week, guide.  The photos are definitely not going to be in chronological order. If you're bothered by that, come here and document your own visit the way you want.

I arrived in Moscow one day in late September at 10 AM and it took 2 hours to get from the airport to IUM.  The reason is that two drivers stopped their cars in the middle lane of a highway and went to take the Metro. OK, not really.  They got into an accident and just abandoned their cars there. Seriously. It seemed that way to me.  The whole time my driver kept saying the backed-up traffic was a nightmare (кошмар, кошмар,...).  Once the taxi passed those two stuck cars, where neither drivers nor police seemed to be nearby, it was very smooth sailing.  In fact everyone was driving so fast, and rain was falling, that I was worried I'd be in my own accident, but everything turned out fine.

The folks at IUM gave me a great apartment.  The director of IUM, Michael Tsfasman, drove me over to the building on the first evening and arranged for me to get a set of keys.  A fellow I know, let's call him "Vasya", came to visit me on my first evening and told me that it looked like I was living in a museum of the 1970s or 1980s.  You be the judge.

Here are photos of the bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bathroom.  In the living room photo, the picture  surrounded by New Year's bling is a copy of "Morning in a Pine Forest", which is a very well-known painting here.

Here is the view from the living room towards the balcony and through the balcony:

I was able to use a laptop with a US--Europe plug adapater in the bedroom and living room, but I was puzzled why it didn't work with the outlet in the kitchen:

I found out two weeks later why: despite appearances that is not an electric outlet.  It is an outlet meant only for Soviet radios and used to be in everyone's kitchen during Communism.  It is just an historical relic now.  In fact there was a correct outlet all along: look above the counter in an earlier kitchen photo and you'll see a 3-series outlet on the wall.  I didn't like the idea of dragging a wire near the oven, so I hardly ever use a laptop in the kitchen.

Here is dinner one evening:

As someone else observed, the tomatos were clearly added on as an afterthought to counteract the rest of the meal.  The cat on the sour cream container, and for that matter the brand of sour cream (Prostokvashino) is taken from the only Russian book unrelated to math which I have ever read cover to cover.  It's probably meant for 6-year olds (the book, not the sour cream). There is an upcoming New Year's show with those characters, but I'll be gone by then:

I used the kitchen table at other times to prepare my lectures:

In the photo below is the remnant of an ad on the wall of the elevator of my apartment building. It might have been for a dental office. The last line of the ad (Мы лучшие в России) means "We're the best in Russia" and some wiseguy scribbled a cynical reaction (это большая страна = "it's a big country"). I wonder who that was.

Outside the apartment building is a children's playground.  Even with the new-fangled equipment in the center, the old swingset still gets used.

On the other side of the playground is a wall with an interesting picture on it.  This is not at all evident from the playground photo, as the wall is largely hidden by trees, but at another time of day and from another vantage point here is what's on the side of that wall:

This is a scene from a famous animated film called Hedgehog in the Fog. You can find copies of the film with English subtitles on YouTube. It was once voted "best cartoon of all time".  Hmm.

As I said already, I am working at IUM, so let's take a look at it.  I was told that before IUM moved in,  the building was a children's school.

The sign on the front says "Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education". There is a cat often sitting on the window outside the security guard's room:

Let's now go inside.  The front area generally has piles of packages.

There is also a ping-pong table there, which I haven't used yet. I wonder if Serre tried it during his visit.

One time (see photo below) there was a huge pile of math prep books for the Unified State Exam (ЕГЭ), which is a nationwide exam introduced over the last 10 years that all students must now pass to enter any university.  It was raining on the day of the photo, so to keep the mat in place someone decided to use the exam prep books (in their shrink-wrapped packaging) as weights.  This is a great example of applied math, in case anyone ever asks you what math is any good for (other answers include door stops and desk leg raisers).

The reason so many books are delivered is, in part, because of the bookstore at IUM, which is the best place in Moscow to find anything related to mathematics at any level. There are always lots of parents, some with kids in tow, coming to IUM to buy math books for their children. Here is the bookstore from the outside:

One day there were no piles of books near the entrance and I was so astonished that I looked at the security guard, pointed to the empty space, and said чудо! ("it's a miracle!") The guard understood immediately what I meant.

In the IUM bookstore, I found the following interesting little volume called "How to Write a Mathematics Article in English".  In the above photo it's straight ahead on the right side of the third shelf from the bottom.  Here is a closer view:

The author, Sossinski, works at IUM and in fact has a class at the time same as mine, so I see him around a fair bit.  He grew up in France except for a few years in the US, so he is equally comfortable in French, English, and Russian (although he prefers English over Russian for mathematics)  One day at lunch I asked him how to say "measuring cup" in Russian. I had been trying without success to find one in a supermarket, and was hamstrung partly because I didn't know the right term.  Much to my surprise, Sossinski said he didn't remember how to say measuring cup!  So he turned to someone at a nearby table and, using Russian and hand gestures, asked what you call a cup with marked lines used to measure things.  Well, the answer is мерная чашка, which literally is "measuring cup".  Returning to the supermarket with my new terminology in hand, I asked where in the store measuring cups were sold.  It turns out they didn't sell them.
 

On the weekend after I bought "How to Write a Mathematics Article in English" I read through the whole thing.  I found a lot of mistakes and forwarded the list to Sossinski.   The only one I will record here is a subtle error: in the introduction he writes that the book will explain, for Russians, how to write  an article in American English, as opposed to British English.  So who is the genius who put a picture of Big Ben on the cover?
Sossinski, after skimming over my list, suggested I should write a document on how to give a math lecture in Russian for foreigners.  I had actually already started writing something along those lines, but so far only for myself.

Elsewhere on the ground floor of IUM there is a cafeteria.  The wall in the cafeteria has lots of mathematical expressions, diagrams, and problems on it.  Here is the wall over the entrance/exit, taken from inside the cafeteria:

Anyone in math who doesn't know Russian will at least recognize the Riemann hypothesis at the bottom.  The Russian text above it is the Poincare conjecture ("Is any simply connected three-dimensional closed manifold homeomorphic to a sphere?"). Since the answer to that is now known, I asked the director Tsfasman why they don't paint "Да" on the wall after the question mark.  He said it's a good idea.

While the cafeteria is on the ground floor, lunch at IUM is always paid in advance on the top floor.  In exchange for money per meal you get a ticket, and in the cafeteria you just hand over a ticket to get your food.  Then the staff in the cafeteria returns the tickets to the people upstairs and the cycle starts over.  It's a pretty good system that avoids any need to wait while others pay for their food in the cafeteria.  I usually get 5 or 6 lunch tickets at a time. Here is a typical lunch:

Notice the utensils made out of solid gold.  The lunch always consists of soup, a main course with a varying choice of side dish (that day it was carrots), compote (a drink with sliced fruit in it), and a roll stuffed with some variable contents (sometimes sweet, sometimes not).  I was buying just a plain lunch ticket for the first two weeks and then one day I saw someone with the roll, which I had never received.  Nobody had explained to me that the rolls needed their own ticket. By the time I took the photo above I was clued in and getting my roll ticket with the lunch ticket each time.   

My companion at lunch on the day of the photo, behind the compote, was the Russian translation of volume 2 of Hewitt and Ross's Abstract Harmonic Analysis, borrowed from the IUM library. The translation was written in the early 1950s, during the time when Soviet writers, even in math, had to demonstrate excessive nationalism. Volume 1 had some nice touches in this direction: Hewitt and Ross called the Pontryagin duality theorem "the Pontryagin-van Kampen duality theorem", and while the translator retained this terminology there was a footnote added saying that, insofar as the key ideas were concerned, it would be better to call the result Pontryagin's theorem.  (Pontryagin proved the duality theorem for the case of compact and discrete groups, with some countability hypotheses, while van Kampen proved the general case building on Pontryagin's work.) In the translation of Halmos' book Measure Theory, also from the 1950s, the direct product of sets or of  measure spaces was called a Cartesian product but the direct product of topological spaces received a special name in the translation: Tychonoff product. In the 1950 translation of Weil's book on integration on topological groups, the translator felt Weil did not do enough justice to the work of Soviet mathematicians in harmonic analysis so there were extra sections added to the book about their additional achievements, almost doubling the size of the book. 

A funny side note about Weil's book. I happened to be reading it while waiting near a restaurant for a friend (let's call him "Vasya") to arrive.  Here is the book that evening:

I turned at one point to the last page, which was an ad for other math books by foreign authors (e.g, Veblen and Whitehead's Foundations of Differential Geometry). Readers were told that if they could not find the books they wanted in local stores, orders could be submitted by mail to a bookstore at 36 Arbat Street (sorry these two photos are coming out sideways; at the moment I don't know how to rotate them):

Well I'll be damned:  I was on Arbat Street!  I looked around to see what addresses were nearby and it turned out number 36 was essentially across the street from where I was standing.  It's now an alligator restaurant:

A little to the left is a Starbucks:

At the time I was taking this last photo "Vasya" called to ask where I was, so I had to scramble back to the cow restaurant (Russian name is Moo-Moo) to meet him.

Going back to IUM, let's move from the first floor to the second floor.  Since it's only 4 stories tall there is no elevator (if you need a wheelchair Russia is not an easy place to visit).  On the second floor of the IUM the ceiling in the hallway is covered with math formulas:

Sonya Kovalevskaya (who is famous for work on partial differential equations) said she grew up with pages of her father's calculus book as wallpaper in her room, which she must've assimilated subconsciously because when she first learned calculus she progressed very rapidly, as if the symbols already meant something to her.  I have a colleague at UConn, at the time I'm writing this, who is expecting a daughter in a couple of months and just finished painting a child's bedroom pink.  Maybe he could've tried the math book wallpaper method instead.  There's still time.

Here is a typical classroom on the third floor at IUM:

The sides of the blackboard can be rotated in so that you can use the space on the back to write (I only discovered this several weeks after my course started):

For a professor visiting from North America, one of the potentially annoying features of lecturing in Russia is the lack of erasers.  Instead they use rags.  You can see some blue rags in the photos, lying on the desks. Rags for blackboard are common throughout Europe, and I knew about the rags before I arrived, but I forgot to bring a North American style blackboard eraser with me.  So for the first few weeks I had to use rags while trying to figure out how to find someone to bring an eraser into the country for me.  There are hundreds of people flying into Moscow every day from New York, and any one of them could bring me an eraser, but I didn't know who they were.  So idea #1 never got off the ground.

My next idea was to find an international math conference taking place in Moscow soon, and I did find a website for a conference on numerical analysis coming up, which listed organizers of the conference and it included some Americans.  Awesome.  I would get someone attending from the US to purchase an eraser for me and then meet that person at the conference and pay them back (I had some unconverted US dollars on me). When I wrote to one of the scientific organizers from the US, he told me that he wasn't coming (some organizers for a conference may not attend), but added as moral support that he was no fan of rags to clean blackboards. When I wrote to another organizer from the US he told me that he didn't even realize his name was attached to the conference, so needless to say he wasn't coming either.

Idea #3 was to find an eraser in Moscow. I was advised by a Russian professor in the US that in a city as big as Moscow there had to be an eraser on sale somewhere locally. A staff member at IUM told me this was not true; although whiteboard erasers are available, there aren't blackboard erasers.  Then I asked Sossinski, who suggested I try Dom Knigi (House of Books, well literally House of Book), but he told me I only had a 50% chance that there would be an eraser sold there. It turns out he was right in the positive way.  I was so excited to find erasers there that I bought two:

They were located behind the sales desk in the office supply section of the store. The gems you see above were made in Italy and the verbiage on them says they work on boards of all kinds (blackboards and whiteboards).  I have so far only used one and the second eraser is still in its original packaging.  I thought the locals would like these erasers instead of rags, but in fact when I offered one to a speaker at a seminar he said the rags were quite fine. I guess if a European visitor to the US offered me a rag I'd have a similar reaction: "Sorry buddy, I'll stick with what I'm used to using." I think IUM should stock up on these erasers for their visitors from North America.

In the stairwell, the walls have various mathematical figures on them.  At the wall at the top of the staircase is a diagram showing the special property of a parabola: rays from the focus reflect off the parabola in parallel lines.

This is why the shape of a car headlight is designed as a solid parabola.

On the 4th floor in IUM we reach the office space for professors. On the whiteboard are two  magnetic whiteboard erasers in a country that doesn't use blackboard erasers:

In the photo above, you can see an electric water heater plugged in on the table by the back wall. This small area is where people made tea and might find some small snacks. There is no fridge available in this space, but it's Russia so I can create my own refrigerator (that's yogurt in the photo below):

Let's take a closer look at these windows, which have a feature that will be interesting to many people from the US.  First we see the window in its closed state:

Turn the handle a quarter-turn and it opens on the side:

Then close the window and turn the handle another quarter-turn and it opens from the top:

I thought the top-open feature of these Russian windows was just fantastic (e.g., no papers get blown around from air drafts). Someone outside Russia who saw these photos said that they are like windows in Germany, so of course anyone who has spent time in Germany will think this interest in the windows is a bit excessive.  I looked closer and noticed that in fact they really are German windows.  There is a strip along the top, which you might notice if you look closely, which identifies the company: KBE. They have offices in Canada, but not the US.

The faculty space at IUM is officially designated as a foreign branch of the CNRS (French scientific research center), called the Poncelet laboratory, but there are no test tubes. On account of the CNRS connection, there are a lot of people visiting or working at IUM who speak French, which I don't. Sometimes in the office it sounds to me like I'm in France. One time the director, Tsfasman, started speaking to me in French. I must've had a look of utter confusion on my face since he soon stopped and switched to Russian or English. Everyone is quite friendly.

A few weeks after I arrived the laboratory made space available in a new room, where there was a more expansive area for tea, coffee, and various snacks, as well as a real refrigerator:

I contributed some boxes of tea and the red cartoon in the central part of the whiteboard.

Here is a video I took of the walk from the Smolenskaya metro station (on the dark blue line) to IUM.