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Dear Julia, Dear Yuri: A mathematical correspondence (2022)

by Allyn Jackson I became so excited I wanted to telephone Leningrad and find out if it were true but the mathematicians here [in Berkeley] said not to — after all the world has waited 70 years without knowing the answer to Hilbert’s tenth problem, surely you can wait a few weeks more. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.

Frus­trated by Chud­novsky’s “am­bigu­ous for­mu­la­tions,” Yuri wrote to Ju­lia on 3 March 1973, “I can’t real­ize why a man who in­deed found his proof in­de­pend­ently could not write about it ex­pli­citly.” In this and oth­er let­ters he also noted that Chud­novsky did not give prop­er at­tri­bu­tion to the con­tri­bu­tions of oth­ers and seemed not to dis­tin­guish between what he had done him­self and what he had learned from oth­ers. His let­ters tell of a new apart­ment, his wife’s long ill­ness, her re­cov­ery, the birth of their daugh­ter Dasha (“I felt like jump­ing up and dan­cing around the room as I read your let­ter,” was Ju­lia’s re­ac­tion on 2 June 1979. This article was made possible with generous support from the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley, California.

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