This was of course an extremely political examination, and they could really manipulate whatever they wanted, because it was not the question of your knowledge but the question of interpretation. You could be accused that your point of view was wrong. They tried to fail me and I was saved only by Professor Nina Uraltseva. She was the representative of the mathematics department on this political committee, and she blocked the attempt to fail me, so I got some low but passing grade.

I was admitted with a catch requiring that after I finish my degree, I would go as far as possible away from Leningrad, to Siberia or the Soviet far east.

Georgii Petrashen courageously prioritised merit over ideology and made an attempt to hire Eliashberg. However, the Steklov Institute director forbade branch directors from hiring Jews without his personal permission. Several times during that year Petrashen visited Moscow, planning, among other things, to discuss Eliashberg's employment with Steklov's director, but each time he found the moment to be inopportune. When time finally ran out and the conversation could be postponed no longer, Petrashen summoned the courage to advocate for Eliashberg. His courage was punished with a one-week confinement in a mental hospital.

... for a number of works on global singularity theory.

Syktyvkar was a normal city, and they just founded a new university there. The rector of this university was a woman, and Leningrad University was assigned the role of a senior university by the party bosses, supervising the new one, so they were obliged to send some people there. Of course, I was just finishing and getting my doctorate at that time, so the Syktyvkar rector picked me to go there, and I worked there for 7 years.

The authors develop a new general technique for constructing foliations of codimension ≥ 2 on closed manifolds. They extend the Thurston existence theorem to families of foliations. The approach is based on the surgery technique developed by the second author in 'Surgery of singularities of smooth mappings' (1972).

... when they left, then gradually it became known to the university administration that my brother's family had emigrated. I was then the chairman of the mathematics department, and my position became extremely weak, because the role of the chair is to fight with the administration, but whenever I would start a fight, the Rector would say "why are you listening to him, he has relatives living in California and waiting for him." In any case, then I with my wife [Adasa] decided that we will also go. I resigned from the university [in 1979] and returned to Leningrad and applied for emigration, but it was already the wrong time because the Russian war in Afghanistan started soon after. After that all emigration practically stopped.

It was a great disappointment for all of us that many of the invited speakers from the Soviet Union did not come to Berkeley; in fact, almost half of the Soviet speakers were not present. This is a serious loss for everybody concerned and defeats the purpose of the Congress. It is most important for any Congress that the invited speakers are able to attend in order to deliver their lecture in person and to take part in the exchange of ideas. We are aware that our Soviet colleagues worked very hard at resolving this problem, and we appreciate their efforts. Also, most of the manuscripts of the absent speakers were made available and could be presented by other mathematicians.

Graphs arise when studying many problems of symplectic and contact topology. Sometimes the structure of the graphs can be investigated and this delivers deep results towards "rigidity" of contact and symplectic structures. In this report I shall discuss two such combinatorial reductions in the simplest situation.

It has been known for several years that the author made a breakthrough in symplectic geometry by establishing global rigidity properties for symplectic and contact manifolds. The present paper publishes a part of the corresponding proofs.

This is a set of three lectures given by the author at a conference. They form a superb introduction to the ideas and questions of symplectic and contact topology. The reader is taken on a guided tour of all major ideas with a lot of motivation and ideas of proofs. The key questions in this fast developing field are clearly stated and their importance relative to other branches of mathematics is highlighted.

Symplectic geometry serves as a geometric language of classical and quantum mechanics. I was lucky to witness the birth, and participate in the first steps of symplectic topology, a branch of symplectic geometry designed to answer qualitative problems in mechanics, such as the existence of periodic orbits. A tightly related topic of my research is contact geometry and topology, inspired by problems in geometric optics and non-holonomic mechanics. Problems in symplectic topology led me to the theory of functions of several complex variables, where I was able to find a complete topological characterisation of affine complex manifolds. One of the most important techniques, the theory of pseudo-holomorphic curves, was introduced into symplectic topology by M Gromov. Gromov-Witten theory combines Gromov's theory with a physics inspired algebraic formalism of E Witten. Together with H Hofer and A Givental, I recently began to develop an enhanced version of the Gromov-Witten theory, called symplectic field theory (SFT). The SFT has already found many applications and we hope that many more are yet to come, particularly in such seemingly unrelated areas as the theory of completely integrable systems and low-dimensional topology.

... for his work in symplectic and contact topology.

Yakov Eliashberg is a leading mathematician who has made exceptional achievements in what is currently one of the most active areas of research in mathematics. Without the work of Eliashberg, symplectic topology and contact topology would not even exist in their current form.

... for the development of contact and symplectic topology and ground-breaking discoveries of rigidity and flexibility phenomena.

... for his foundational work on symplectic and contact topology changing the face of these fields, and for his ground-breaking contribution to homotopy principles for partial differential relations and to topological foundations of multi-dimensional complex analysis.

... a veritable cornucopia of ideas and surprising links between contact geometry and the theory of foliations.

The h-principle has been a useful way to prove, or interpret prior proofs of, results in topology and geometry. This book describes many of these applications with a specific emphasis on symplectic and contact geometry and various embedding and immersion theorems. In addition one can find a good introduction to the literature.

The book under review is a landmark piece of work that establishes a fundamental bridge between complex geometry and symplectic geometry. It is both a research monograph of the deepest kind and a panoramic companion to the two fields.

Contact topology studies contact manifolds and their Legendrian submanifolds up to contact diffeomorphisms. It was born, together with its sister Symplectic topology, less than 20 years ago, essentially in seminal works of D Bennequin and M Gromov. However, despite several remarkable successes the development of Contact topology is still significantly behind its symplectic counterpart. In this talk we will discuss the state of the art and some recent breakthroughs in this area.

Symplectic field theory (SFT) attempts to approach the theory of holomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds (also called Gromov-Witten theory) in the spirit of a topological field theory. This naturally leads to new algebraic structures which seems to have interesting applications and connections not only in symplectic geometry but also in other areas of mathematics, e.g. topology and integrable PDE. In this talk we sketch out the formal algebraic structure of SFT and discuss some current work towards its applications.

Flexible mathematics was born in the work of Hassler Whitney in 1930s-1940s, Stephen Smale and John Nash in 1950s, and then greatly developed by Mikhail Gromov in the late 1960s-early 1970s under the name of the h-principle. In recent years the area went through a period of renaissance. In the lectures there will be discussed the evolution of notions and methods of the h-principle and consider a few recent examples from complex, symplectic and contact geometries.

I like to travel, hiking, a lot of interesting things I would like to participate in. For example, in my childhood I played violin and planned to be a professional violinist. However, I changed to mathematics and now I do not play anymore, which is something I do regret a bit.