24 Facts About Igor Shafarevich

Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry.

From his early years, Shafarevich made fundamental contributions to several parts of mathematics including algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic algebraic geometry.

Igor Shafarevich was the first mathematician to give a completely self-contained formula for the Hilbert pairing, thus initiating an important branch of the study of explicit formulas in number theory.

Igor Shafarevich started a famous Moscow seminar on classification of algebraic surfaces that updated the treatment of birational geometry around 1960 and was largely responsible for the early introduction of the scheme theory approach to algebraic geometry in the Soviet school.

Igor Shafarevich formulated the Shafarevich conjecture, which stated the finiteness of the set of Abelian varieties over a number field having fixed dimension and prescribed set of primes of bad reduction.

Igor Shafarevich was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the department of Mathematics, Physics and Earth Sciences.

In 2017, Igor Shafarevich was awarded the Leonhard Euler Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Igor Shafarevich came into conflict with the Soviet authorities in the early 1950s but was protected by Ivan Petrovsky, the Rector of Moscow University.

Igor Shafarevich belonged to a group of Pochvennichestvo-influenced dissidents who endorsed the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Igor Shafarevich published a book, The Socialist Phenomenon, which was cited by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 address to Harvard University.

Igor Shafarevich argued that ancient socialism was not ideological, as an ideology socialism was a reaction to the emergence of individualism in the Axial Age.

Igor Shafarevich compared Thomas More's and Tommaso Campanella's visions with what is known about the Inca Empire and concluded that there are striking similarities.

Igor Shafarevich claimed that we become persons through our relationship with God and argued that socialism is essentially nihilistic and is unconsciously motivated by a death instinct.

Igor Shafarevich concluded that we have the choice of pursuing death or life.

Igor Shafarevich adhered to Russian Orthodox Christianity and incorporated the neo-Platonic views of Eastern Orthodoxy into his understanding of the relation of mathematics and religion.

Igor Shafarevich noted the multiple discoveries in mathematics, such as that of non-Euclidean geometry, to suggest that pure mathematics reflects an objective reality, not a set of conventional definitions or a formalism.

Igor Shafarevich claimed that the growth of mathematics itself is not directed or organic.

Igor Shafarevich opted for the latter, as pure mathematics is not in itself driven by practical applications.

Igor Shafarevich completed the Russophobia essay in 1982 and it was initially circulated as samizdat.

Igor Shafarevich noted that since NAS enlisted him without his request or knowledge, delisting him was its internal matter.

Nevertheless, when the United States invaded Iraq, Igor Shafarevich faxed his resignation.

Later, Igor Shafarevich expanded on his views in his book Three Thousand-Year-Old Mystery in which he further claimed that Jews effectively marginalise and exclude non-Jews in all types of intellectual endeavors.

In 2005, Igor Shafarevich was amongst the signatories of the Letter of 5000.

The issue of Igor Shafarevich's alleged antisemitism has been the subject of a 2009 doctoral thesis at the University of Helsinki, which was later turned into a book in which the author, Krista Berglund, stated that Igor Shafarevich's views have been misconstrued as antisemitic.