Yuri Manin and Two Cultures

In my opinion, Manin was an outcast of the Moscow math community by many reasons. The first and foremost reason was envy. Manin was a genius and polymath. He had Jewish roots and he was a student of Shafarevich. Also he was on the staff of the Steklov Institute in the times of Vinogradov's endurance to Antisemitism, but he was allowed to visit Grothendieck. These are just a few grounds for some traces of ostensible ostracism.

Manin was distinguished by his humanitarian inclinations. Israel Gelfand wrote:

  Only a very few people in the 20th century turned out to be capable of the required synthesis of the two cultures — mathematics and the human sciences. Among them I can name Andrej Kolmogorov, who always understood the world as a unified whole. This was also understood, perhaps on a more naive level, with a stronger technocratic influence, by John von Neumann. In the field of social sciences, closer to the humanities, this synthesis was effected by Leonid Kantorovich.

Manin belonged to the same species.

The precipice in Russia between humanitarians and scientists is mainly tied with the Soviet epoch. The science in Russia was scarce before the 20th century, but Lomonosov was the harbinger of poetry in Russia, Euler wrote Letters to a German princess, and Dahl was a corresponding member of the Physics and Mathematics Division of the Academy. The reason for the precipice in the USSR is obvious. Marxism was pauperized and turned in a totalitarian sect for the majority of the disciples of humanities.

Aleksandr Alexandrov often declared as follows:

  A philosopher is a failed scientist overflowing with mania grandiosa.