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2010 Annual Report

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Founders’’ Letter
My father did not have the freedom to pursue the career of his choice in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he produced copious research on dynamical systems, a branch of mathematics, in his spare time.
When I was four years old, there was an international conference on the subject in Warsaw——a rare event in any scientic eld behind the Iron Curtain. Even though he was not o cially allowed to attend and it was challenging to get permission to travel, my father was able to make the trip with the help of supporters in Poland. What he learned there went well beyond mathematics, and dramatically changed the course of our lives. Contrary to what my father had been taught, the mathematicians from the other side of the Iron Curtain were not monsters. They were fellow scientists who shared the same passions. The key di erence was that they were free: free to pursue the career of their choice, free to voice their opinions, free

to travel, and above all they were free from fear of their own government. That small but powerful piece of information drove my family to ee the Soviet Union two years later and start a new life in the United States. Today the vast majority of the world’’s population has access to mobile phones, and over two billion people are connected to the Internet. As a result, the trickle of information that made its way into closed societies such as the USSR when I was a child has now become a torrent——and millions of people living under totalitarian regimes are able to glimpse freedom every day of their lives, albeit virtually. While the trends in technology and communication that made this all possible have been clear for decades, I believe we have now reached...