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This was really so. Russia had a long tradition of excellence in Mathematics. In addition, the usual Soviet method for attacking hard problems was to combine pressure from the authorities with people's enthusiasm. When [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin Stalin] decided to develop the Bomb, many bright mathematicians, e.g. [[Mathematician#Gelfand|Israel Gelfand]] and my first Math teacher, [[Alexander Kronrod]], put aside their mathematical studies and delved deeply into the novel area of computing. They have assembled teams of talented people, and succeeded. The teams continued to grow and work on the theory of computing.
The supervisor of my M.Sc. thesis was Georgy Adelson-Velsky, one of the fathers of Computer Science. Among the students in his group were M. Kronrod (one of the future "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_Four_Russians Four Russians]", i.e. the four authors of}} <ref>[[Vladimir Arlazarov]], [http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~dinitz/ E. A. Dinic], [http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199234004.013.2826 M. A. Kronrod], [https://zbmath.org/authors/?q=ai:faradzhev.i-a I. A. Faradzhev] ('''1970'''). ''On economical construction of the transitive closure of a directed graph''. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_USSR_Academy_of_Sciences Doklady Akademii Nauk] (in English) 194, No. 11, 1209-1210</ref>{{), A. Karzanov (the future author of the O(n3) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_flow_problem network flow algorithm] <ref>[http://alexander-karzanov.net/ Alexander V. Karzanov] ('''1974'''). ''[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/230837862_Determining_the_maximal_flow_in_a_network_by_the_method_of_preflows Determining the maximal flow in a network by the method of preflows]''. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_USSR_Academy_of_Sciences Soviet Mathematics - Doklady], Vol. 15, No. 1</ref>) and other talented school pupils of A. Kronrod. This was in 1968, long after the Bomb project completed. The work on the foundations of the chess program "[[Kaissa]]", created by members of A. Kronrod's team under guidance of Adelson-Velsky, was almost finished; "Kaissa" won the [[WCCC 1974|first world championship]] in 1974. Adelson-Velsky's new passion became discrete algorithms, which he felt had a great future.
The fundamental contribution of Adelson-Velsky to Computer Science was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVL_tree AVL-trees]. He (AV) and [[Mathematician#Landis|Evgenii Landis]] (L) published a paper about AVL-trees in early 60's, consisting of just a few pages. Besides solving an important problem, it presented a bright approach to data structure maintenance. While this approach became standard in the USSR, it was still not known in the West. No reaction followed their publication during a couple of years, until another paper, 15 pages long, was published by a researcher, which understood how AVL-trees work and explained this to the Western community, in its language. Since then, AVL-trees and the entire data structure maintenance approach became a corner-stone of Computer Science.
