The Russians are Coming (and the Chinese, too)

Out of the UO’s 27 mathematics faculty, five have come from China and eight from the former Soviet Union. Both regions have extremely strong mathematical traditions, but have not always enjoyed good political relationships with the U.S.

“Traditionally, science was political in the Soviet Union," said Hal Sadofsky, the head of UO's mathematics department. He speculates that mathematics may have been less political than other scientific disciplines, thereby drawing a somewhat larger percentage of really smart people.

In the last decades of the 20th century, some of those smart mathematicians were able to either visit the west or emigrate and settle into cosmopolitan, highly-regarded research programs like the UO’s math department, which is benefitting from their rigorous training.

Sergey Yuzvinsky, for instance, has been in Oregon since 1980. His primary research interest springs from something called hyperplane arrangements. Starting with simple problems derived from the dissection of three-dimensional objects, the area has developed into an interesting branch of mathematics applicable in many other disciplines, including robotics.

Scholars from China have also contributed to UO’s research muscle. Yuan Xu, together with two German colleagues, has recently been working on new algorithms and devices for x-ray tomography that have the potential to improve the imaging quality of the CT machine (used for CT or CAT scans). Since 2004, they have filed seven joint patents. And last year, Xu won one of the UO’s prestigious faculty excellence awards.

“A lot of the people we hire did graduate work in the U.S.,” said Sadofsky. “As much as people decry the U.S. educational system — for good reasons, I think — our graduate schools are still the graduate schools the world comes to.”