SCIENCE
Russian and Ukrainian mathematicians find their common denominator
Mikhail Burtsev, left, from Russia, and Oleksandr Kosyak, from Ukraine, have found academic sanctuary at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences
Oleksandr Kosyak is used to imagining improbable relationships. That is, after all, what group theorists do. His is a world of transformations in infinite dimensional spaces, of operations and interactions between abstract objects.
Even so, Kosyak, a Ukrainian, struggles when considering the improbability of one less-abstract relationship: the one he is to have with his new Russian colleagues. “In Ukraine a lot of people don’t like Russians,” he says. “But you can also imagine . . . ” he chooses his words, “. . . adequate . . . Russians.”
Kosyak, 67, is very smiley and he is smiling now. Equally, his response is not completely without an edge.
Sitting on a sofa in London, a year after he fled Kyiv, he is the beneficiary
