31–40 of 98 posts
My favourite publisher from the 70's and 80's. Only a specific town in South India used to have a shop that sells Russian books and communist literature. Travelled to that town and bought a few chess books. "Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies" by Gary Kasparyan was always in my hands.
Books like Problems In physics by I E Irodov were my favourites
Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my favorite short cartoon from that era (I still hum its music involuntarily): Ikarus and the Wise Men [0]
Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Quick question. What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research. Is it that they have better quality books?
also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.
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>This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people. How do you people come up with such stories?
I don't know... Maybe by growing up in Russia and starting my software career there? To add some color, here is my favorite hard-to-translate idiom in a Russian developer community: "File away rough edges" ("доработать напильником") - adjust something to work in a way that its original creator never even realized is possible. And usually for a good reason. Of course, all generalizations should be taken with a grain o…
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For entrance exams though... At least in Poland, we had them as well. They were corrupt. Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni. And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.
Oh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams. And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
Very fond memories of Mir Publishers' science and math books growing up in India in the 80s and 90s. I think English translations were freely available in India. My grandfather would buy them for me to encourage my interest in science and math. If I could find physical copies of those books I would buy them in a heartbeat today. Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my fa…
Very fond memories of Mir Publishers' science and math books growing up in India in the 80s and 90s. I think English translations were freely available in India. My grandfather would buy them for me to encourage my interest in science and math. If I could find physical copies of those books I would buy them in a heartbeat today. Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my fa…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un...