gromov2

И еще прекрасный анекдот

Something else written by Tony, a private letter to me, also kept me puzzled
for quite awhile. This letter contained a couple of pages of incomprehensible
mathematics, starting with something like:
... an involutive gromomorphism G ∶ SU → US of admissible type... T
transforms MG → SB...
I could not understand a single sentence in it. But when I showed this to my
friend, an analyst Volodia Eidlin, he asked me: "What is a gromomorphism?"
"You mean homomorphism" { I replied { "There is no such thing as gromo-
morphism". ("Homomorphism" is spelled and pronounced as "gomomorphism"
in Russian.)
"Do you ever read anything as it is written?" { he was annoyed { "This is
"gromomorphism", black on white."
"Must be a misspel..." { I mumbled, but then it dawned on me. Tony's
was an encoded message. He was suggesting I would immigrate from the Soviet
Union to US and invited me to SUNY at Stony Brook where he worked. (We
met with Tony when he visited to Russia a year earlier. His visit was brief, but
long enough to learn the basic conspiracy survival rules in Soviet Russia.)