A. Shen

Russian mathematician and computer scientist who entered Moscow State University's Mekh-mat as a student in 1974, began graduate study there in 1979, and taught in Soviet mathematical schools from 1977 onward — a direct participant-witness to the entrance-exam discrimination he later documented. His 1994 Mathematical Intelligencer Opinion piece, "Entrance Examinations to the Mekh-mat," is the vault's richest primary source on how Mekh-mat's "coffin problems" mechanism actually worked: he names ~20 problems verbatim, each dated and attributed to a specific examiner, and reproduces B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov's statistical evidence of the resulting admission-rate gap.

References

• claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants
• claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md