Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Russia's Math Geniuses Work Mainly in the West

New research suggests Russia has lost its best mathematical minds to the U.S. and Europe.

January 21, 2016 at 8:41 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Winning the numbers game.
Photographer: Adam Wolffbrandt/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images

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In Michael Lewis's book "Flash Boys," one of the characters, telecom expert Ronan Ryan, suddenly noticed around 2005 that more and more trading software "seemed to be written by guys with thick Russian accents." That was because most of these guys were no longer doing academic work in Russia and other former Soviet countries.

A recent paper published in Moscow by Vladlen Timorin and Ivan Sterligov from the Higher School of Economics attempts to quantify the outflow of Russian mathematicians since the Soviet Union's collapse -- a momentous migration that has changed the academic and business landscape in the U.S. -- and orphaned Russia of its best and brightest, but hasn't completely wiped it out as a math superpower.