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by marco_craveiro
1778 days ago
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As a Portuguese citizen, I was not exposed to Russian mathematics during my entire academic career until I entered university. Whilst slightly better than the UK, our educational system was also not brilliant when it came to maths, and we only started to do calculus close to Year 12 (the last year before university). Anyways, my one and only brush with Russian mathematics was as follows - I flunked Integral and Differential calculus on Year 1 at uni, and was getting really worried it would take me a while to do this subject. In Portugal you need to repeat a subject until you get a pass grade. Then a cousin told me I had to "do Piskunov". In those days you didn't buy books, you'd photocopy them, so he gave me a very large photocopied manuscript of Piskunov [1] in Spanish. I had never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a game; it had very little instructions, and it started with absolutely trivial exercises, but continued on and on, relentlessly. And somehow, it got you hooked. I read the entire set of books compulsively, just to see what the next exercise would throw at me. I finished my exam really quickly and got 95% (in my rush, I made one mistake in the exam). My teacher even asked me about some of the ways in which I solved some of the exercises. [1] https://mirtitles.org/2012/03/06/integeral-and-differential-... |
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