---
title: "Edward Frenkel"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Edward Frenkel"
aliases: ["Edik"]
first_seen: "2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Mekh-mat coffin problems","Mark Saul","Kerosinka (Gubkin Institute)","antisemitism in Soviet mathematics"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Mathematician, later a professor at UC Berkeley. As a Mekh-mat applicant in
1984, anonymized as "Edik" in Mark Saul's 1999 *Notices of the AMS* account,
he had every answer on his oral entrance exam rejected — including a
definition of a circle marked wrong for omitting the word "all" — and was
privately advised afterward to apply instead to the "Kerosinka" (Gubkin
Institute for Petrochemical and Natural Gas Industry). Frenkel later wrote
his own retrospective essay on the episode, "The Fifth Problem: math &
anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union" (*The New Criterion*, 2012; not fetched
this session).

## References
- [[claim-saul-1999-account-narrates-frenkels-1984-mekh-mat-rejection-and-referral-to-kerosinka]]
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md