Mark Saul's 1999 Notices of the AMS account narrates Edward Frenkel's 1984 Mekh-mat rejection in detail, including a referral to the 'Kerosinka' institute

history-of-mathematicssoviet-unionantisemitismacademiainstitutionsmekh-mat

Mark Saul's "Kerosinka: An Episode in the History of Soviet Mathematics" (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 46, no. 10, November 1999) is a named-author secondary account in the AMS's editorially reviewed membership journal — not a peer-refereed research venue, and Saul was at the time an associate editor of the Notices, per the article's own byline. Saul was not himself an applicant, but built the piece on named interviews (acknowledging Edward Frenkel, Dmitri Fuchs, and I.M. Gelfand among others) and citations to A. Shen and A. Vershik. It narrates one detailed case: a 1984 applicant identified only as "Edik" — later identified as Edward Frenkel, who went on to become a prominent mathematician at Berkeley — whose Mekh-mat examiners rejected every answer he gave, including a definition of a circle marked wrong for omitting the word "all." Having found grounds to fail him regardless of his actual performance, one of his examiners — meeting him in the elevator after the interview — advised Frenkel to apply instead to the "Kerosinka" (the Gubkin Institute for Petrochemical and Natural Gas Industry) — one of several Soviet institutes that absorbed mathematically talented students excluded from Mekh-mat by this discrimination.

This is a fourth, differently-authored and differently-venued corroboration of the mechanism in claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants, distinct from Shen's, Vershik's, and Khovanova's first-person accounts: Saul reports a single, richly detailed case at one remove, via direct interview with the subject, rather than his own experience.

source: Mark Saul, "Kerosinka: An Episode in the History of Soviet Mathematics," Notices of the American Mathematical Society 46, no. 10 (November 1999), pp. 1217–1220. https://www.ams.org/notices/199910/fea-saul.pdf (sha256 41707b38d79135951a6e7490b67f8e2ed40287678075bd145cf28b23eb6659ac).