Krawtchouk's Mind

A reader writes: "Central Europe Review is running an article on a gulag-condemned Soviet scientist whose contribution to the first computer is virtually unknown because of the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937, American digital computer pioneer John Atanasoff came across a Myhailo Krawtchouk paper on a new method for finding approximate solutions to differential equations. Atanasoff tried sending a letter to him, but received no response. Krawtchouk had been attainted for giving a favorable review of the work of "enemies of the people" and shipped to Siberia for 20 years of gold mining, where he died four years later. Krawtchouk's biography gives a more detailed account of how Krawtchouk was labeled a "Polish spy" and "Ukrainian nationalist," stripped of his Academy of Sciences membership, and forced to sign a confession -- that he later retracted -- under torture and threats upon his family. "

Comments

Similar things continue...

[mi]

Although similar persecutions continue in some countries to these days, the public opinion in many democracies would not tolerate any outside action against the oppressing governments.

Living your life under Stalin, Kim of North Korea, Castro, Saddam Hussein is worse than war... Trade sanctions -- a modern democracies' usual "civilized" weapon against each other -- don't work against these scumbags. They pass the suffering onto their people...

Re:jjayson on kuro5hin.org got ripped off

[_xeno_]

I'd like to hear what Hemos has to say, the editorial integrity issues need to be addressed.

But, apparently, won't be. Why was this modded down? It's not offtopic, it isn't trolling, and it isn't flamebait. (And it's hard to be overrated when starting at 0.) It's a statement of someone's opinion, and a rather reasonable one at that. Slashdot has been caught plagarizing another site. So some questions arize: Did the editors really get an anonymous submission and hense didn't know it was plagarized? Or, did the author of the original piece also post to Slashdot? Or, did the authors willingly and knowingly plagarize the article?

A simple acknowledgement of the fact that the story in on Kuro5hin and an explanation of why would do well to calm any conspiracy theorists. Simply ignoring the issue doesn't help and just raises resentment against the editors, who really seem to have an "I don't care" attitude about a site they want us to pay to use.