Sergiu Klainerman - Seeing The Future In The Past

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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.