Homepage of Sergey Bratus

That's me, Sergey Bratus .

If I promised you something, look for it here .

I am a Ph.D. student at the Dept. of Mathematics , Northeastern University. My advisor is Professor V. Lakshmibai , I also work with Prof. Gene Cooperman and Prof. Larry Finkelstein of the Computer Science Department of NU. Have a look at the problem I am trying to solve.

I spent my four undergraduate years at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology studying applied math, physics and a bit of mathematical economics. I consider that to be equivalent to a B.S. in math with minors in physics and math economics. In 1993 I came to Northeastern University for a Ph.D. in pure math, got my M.S. in math in 1996 and am working towards my Ph.D. now. Along the way I got interested in computers ( fascinated is a better word here), to the point of planning to get at least an M.S. in Computer Science.

Here are some of my bookmarks .

From this page you can learn more about

my education and personal history

the course I am teachning.

my interests

my contribution to the Web (I remember the Internet before the Web era)

other things I like

my friends on the Web.

My interests

I'll be brief here, simply because this section threatens to grow completely out of proportion if unchecked. Here we go:

Literature:

Nabokov, Borges, Tolkien.
Each created self-sufficient and wonderful worlds. Each has that unmistakable aura of (literary?) magic about his creations, however different they might be. I don't think either has been well-understood so far.

Mythology:

Norse (Teutonic) especially, but Celtic is also good. There is something in learning the lore of lost cultures that turns out to be coherent where you don't expect it to be. If you are looking for a fan of Wagner's Ring, look no further. ( And yes, he was antisemitic. Sad but true. No, you can't find it anywhere in his operas. )

Language:

English, German, and my native Russian.
Now here is another sort of coherence. Fellow mathematicans, language is not just a collection of random combinations of sounds plus some grammar. Dear linguists, I envy you a whole lot. My favourite fairy story is Shaw's "Pygmalion".

Translation:

an art unto itself, the Art.
Nothing more wondorous than a good translation, nothing more dismal than a poor one. I plan to devote a separate page to it.

Mathematics

Of course! There's nothing like it. As the old saying goes,

Biologists think they are biochemists,
Biochemists think they are Physical Chemists,
Physical Chemists think they are Physicists,
Physicists think they are Gods,
And God thinks he is a Mathematician.

So there we are.

My Web stuff.

A gallery of pictures devoted to Tolkien's creations, by Leonid Korablev, a Russian artist. Assembled and maintained by yours truly.

Translation of Victor Pelevin's interesting short story "Hermit and Sixfinger" . Raw version! Comments very welcome.

Things I like.

Sushi and beer
Computer games: Myst, Skyrealms of Jorune, Loom, to name a few.
Sci-fi in general and Babylon 5 in particular (although the last episodes are a tremendous letdown).
Victor Pelevin's novels. "The Yellow Arrow" and "Omon Ra" have been translated into English and recently published. "Chapayev and Void" is still only avaliable in Russian, as far as I know. He is not about Soviet or post-Soviet disgusting stuff, he is all about Escape and Transcendence.
Songs of Mikhail Scherbakov . There's more to them than you notice at first.
and a lot of other things...

My friends on the 'Net

Their pages are, as a rule, better and more informative than mine.

Sergey Winitzki at Tufts and Geocities .
Anya Rumshisskaya (can you spell that?), a brave linguist/anthropologist.
Alexy Khrabrov , now in charge of (Russian) "Burime" and "Sonetnik", and not a bad poet himself.
Nicholas Sushkin, physicst, sysadmin and a master photographer.
Igor Pak, a Harvard mathematician. If you think mathematicians are not interested in the workings of the real world, think again -- here is your counter-example. His politics/sociology/economics page is really interesting.

My story

I was born in Moscow, Russia. During the few years before I left I grew very fond of that city and learned a lot about her 800 year old history. Then (the irony of it all!) I left for Boston (which I still like more than Moscow). After a number of very depressing years spent in local schools of Moscow, I entered the Moscow School #57, an exam school with speciality in Mathematics. If you work in Mathematics, you've probably heard of it or, at least, have met a few of its graduates. Apart from offering excellent math courses (some day I will post what I remember of our programs and what I kept of our study materials) it was all a great school can be (one of the best in Moscow, and hence in the former USSR, it may well be called one of the best in the world, given the international standing of Soviet mathematics). I loved it and I am proud to be its graduate. You can find a list of 57mites around the world here . Recently we celebrated our class reunion at the Restaurant 57 here in Boston. In 1988 I entered the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), a.k.a. PhysTech. Although it was considered one the best places in the country (first in physics, second in math to the Moscow University), I didn't like it much. Under the heavy hand of the KGB (Beria himself was the godfather of the Institute, created to supply engineers for the Soviet nuclear program) the place was anything but cheerful. We had no choice in our programs apart from choosing one of the ten or so departments, over the years many inane yet obligatory courses were introduced to accomodate senior academicians/party members, and extensive military training was also obligatory. The general atmosphere was so stifling and unlike that of respect, freedom and learning enthusiasm of my favorite school that I bitterly regretted not having tried to enter the Moscow University. I was a really good student, but I hardly feel any attachment to MIPT. When opportunity arouse, I left for America to study math, after having spent one year auditing math courses at the Moscow University (Vinberg's Lie groups and Lie algebras & Postnikov's Differential Geometry and Manifolds). . Here is the list of classes I took at NU since September 1993.