Edward Frenkel

So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union in a small town near Moscow called Kolomna.

And I was a smart kid, you know, in school, but mathematics was probably my least favorite subject.

Not because I couldn't do it.

I was a straight-A student and I could do all the problems easily, but I thought it was incredibly boring.

And since the only math I knew was what was presented at school, I thought that was it.

And I was like, what kind of boring subject is this?

So what I really liked was physics.

And especially quantum physics.

So I would go to a bookstore and buy popular books about elementary particles and atoms and things like that and read them, devour them.

And so my dream was to become a theoretical physicist.

and to delve into this finer structure of the universe.

So then something happened.

When I was 15 years old, it turns out that a friend of my parents was a mathematician who was a professor at the local college.

It was a small college preparing educators and teachers.

It's a provincial town.

Imagine it's like 117 kilometers from Moscow, which would be something like 70 miles, I guess.

You do the math.

Yeah.

Isn't it funny how we remember numbers?

Yeah.