Uploaded July 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Or check out my writing and the early releases on Substack at alexkaschuta.substack.com

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.