Martyrdom of a Mathematician

I finished reading Naming Infinity a while ago, but I never did get a chance to wrap up my blogging on the book. The end really is quite tragic, and all the more so because it's a true story.

There is so much to say about all that Dmitri Egorov, Nikolai Luzin, and Pavel Florensky did for mathematics and science, and how their faith influenced their work. But since I have to choose what to focus on in a little blog post, I will choose to talk about how they were treated on account of their faith.

Pavel Florensky and Dmitri Egorov both died for their faith. It's a complicated story, and they both went down distinctly different paths, but in the end they both had the same problem--they were openly Christian under a militantly atheist regime.

Pavel Florensky was a Russian Orthodox priest, but he was also a scientist and inventor, and he is part of this story because he was very close friends with both Egorov and Nikolai Luzin, the other member of this "Russian trio."

I suppose it didn't help him that he insisted on wearing his white priest's cassock while delivering his scientific papers. You can kind of guess how the Soviet police eventually got to him--they "proved" that he was the leader of a counter-revolutionary organization, which of course he had never heard of. They shipped him off to a prison camp where he continued scientific research, but I guess they didn't even want him doing science as a prisoner.

In 1937, Florensky was sentenced to be shot. He was executed on December of that year. Recent evidence suggests the details of this death were not pleasant:

According to this information, in December 1937 Florensky was brought from the Solovetsk Islands to Leningrad, where for a while he was in a prison cell in the "Big House," the headquarters of the Leningrad secret police.... Then, according to this new evidence, Florensky was forced to undress, his hands and feet were bound, and he was taken along with several hundred other people in a convoy of trucks to the Rzhevsky Artillery Range, near the town of Toksovo, about 20 miles south of Leningrad. There, we are told, they were all shot.

What causes certain regimes to have such an irrational hatred of religion (or any dissenting view) so as to treat someone in this way?

Egorov didn't fare much better. What's crazy is that he simply insisted that his religious views were a private affair, and that all views should be tolerated in the university. Nevertheless, when he was arrested in 1930 the charge included "mixing mathematics and religion." Can you imagine living in a country where that's a crime?

While in prison Egorov prayed daily, including practicing the "Jesus Prayer," despite persecution from the guards. He eventually died there in prison due to digestive failure (which had already been a problem before being sent to prison, where his health only deteriorated). His last words are reported to have been, "Save me, O God, by Thy name!" from Psalm 54--which according to the authors of this book were "appropriate to his Name Worshipping creed."

Nikolai Luzin was not martyred for his faith, but he came pretty close. In the tragic "Luzin affair," he was basically put on trial for his faith--the crime was being tied to anything considered anti-Soviet, including the old monarcy and Christianity. Kind of ironic, considering Luzin at one time had been a sympathizer with the revolutionaries.

It's really depressing to see a lot of those big names of mathematics listed among the people who attacked Luzin, such as Alexandrov, Khinchin, Sobolev, Kolmogorov, Liusternik, and Pontriagin. Most of these are names I've heard at one time or another in my analysis classes.

But that's part of why I write this. Who knows what will ultimately draw us to such evil? It may be that a compelling ideology will grip our hearts so tightly that we lose all sanity. It appears as if a whole country was led into insanity by such an ideology. I don't think any amount of intelligence or wisdom can prevent it. Evil cuts through all of our hearts.

In the end Luzin was spared, thanks to the intervention of a famous physicist of the time, Peter Kapitsa. It's still not entirely clear why Stalin spared Luzin in this instance. He got rid of plenty of other people who were just as valuable as scientists. Perhaps we'll never really know.

What a change it is to think about mathematicians as people who suffered for their beliefs! All you typically hear is about how these child geniuses grew up to prove amazing theorems; but rarely is it ever mentioned that mathematicians have been people who struggled through real trials.

And it puts things into perspective. My friends in grad school were talking about this, and one of us said, "Next time we start to complain about departmental politics, I guess we should keep this in mind." We are so blessed to live in a country where freedom is a given.

But finally, this story really is an inspiration to me, in that it makes me contemplate how to integrate my faith completely with my occupation. It's interesting to read the author's of this book struggle with this idea:

"In concluding that mysticism helped Russian mathematicians in the development of descriptive set theory, we have had to overcome our own natural predispositions. Both of us are secular in our outlooks--far from being Name Worshippers ourselves. We did not start out writing this book in order to come down on the side of religion in the infamous science-religion debates that have occupied so large a place in recent public discussions."

As Jesus Christ put it, Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. There really is no need to endlessly debate over religion and science. The faithful simply ought to pursue knowledge with all their heart, and they will bear fruit.

That's my goal in life--a unified pursuit of knowledge. Incidentally, that's why I've been loving Florensky's Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Maybe I'll start blogging about that soon.