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Subversive w/Alex Kaschuta

Sergiu Klainerman - Seeing The Future In The Past

Jul 21, 2021
01:22:14

You can support this podcast and get early releases and bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/aksubversive

Or check out my writing and the early releases on Substack at https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/ 

Sergiu Klainerman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton, where he’s been teaching since 1987.

He's also a fellow Romanian, an anti-communist dissident, someone who successfully fled the regime, and, recently, a fearless voice in what he sees as a rise in the US of the same forces he left behind in 1980s Romania.  

We speak about:

  • His story, becoming disenchanted with communism early on, falling in love with mathematics, and finding a way to escape.
  • The spreading politics of grievance
  • Romania and the eternal Transylvania vs. Bucharest beauty contest
  • Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, "A World Split Apart" and how prophetic he was about what was already happening to a devitalized and self-consuming western liberalism.
  • Faith vs. Reason in mathematics and beyond
  • "The Scientific Consensus" and its discontents
  • Covid and narrative "Science"

His recommended subversive thinker is Galileo Galilei.

You can find his recent essays in Newsweek, Quillette, and National Review.

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