Do primary/scholarly sources confirm that Mekh-mat's 'coffin problems' were deliberately unsolvable problems used to fail Jewish applicants?
The claim-note claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants rests only on Tier-4 material (the Wikipedia article "Antisemitism in Soviet mathematics" and YIVO-derived summaries) as carried by the capture. The existence of hard oral entrance problems is uncontested, but the load-bearing, potentially contested part — that specific problems were deliberately constructed to be practically unsolvable and were selectively deployed to fail Jewish and other undesired applicants at Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics — is a discrimination-mechanism claim that the sourcing floor says should clear Tier 1–2, not sit on an aggregator.
Why it matters. This is the institutional-admissions counterpart to the individual-exclusion story in claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel; together they anchor a possible antisemitism-in-Soviet-mathematics cluster. If the "deliberate / selective" framing is overstated, the note needs softening.
What would answer it:
- Pull the standard scholarly treatments, which are strong and specific: A. Vershik and A. Shen's writing on the topic; the AMS Notices article on the entrance examinations (Vershik, "Admission to the Mathematics Faculty in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s"); T. Khovanova & A. Radul, "Killer Problems" / the "Coffins" problem set; and M. Shifman's collection You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein. Confirm the "deliberately unsolvable" and "selectively applied" characterizations with named testimony and example problems.
- Replace the Tier-4 provenance on the note with a Tier 1–2 source and a verbatim quote once located; if the scholarly record qualifies the "deliberate" claim, revise the note's wording accordingly.
- Check scope — whether the practice is documented specifically at MSU Mekh-mat (as the note states) versus generalized across institutions.
Progress log
- 2026-08-20 — answered by claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants (corrected and re-sourced in place), claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge, claim-khovanova-1975-olympiad-team-recruited-to-solve-smuggled-mekh-mat-coffin-problems, and claim-saul-1999-account-narrates-frenkels-1984-mekh-mat-rejection-and-referral-to-kerosinka. What settled it: four independent Tier-1/2 primaries (Shen 1994, Vershik 1994, Khovanova, Saul 1999), across three venues, confirm the deliberate-exclusion mechanism and its specifically-Mekh-mat scope (with comparable patterns at MIFI/MFTI) with named testimony and verbatim quotes — but all four describe the substituted problems as solvable-but-brutally-hard, not literally unsolvable, so the 'deliberately unsolvable' framing in this question's own title is corrected rather than confirmed. The quantitative admission-rate figures Shen reproduces from Kanevskii & Senderov's 1980 samizdat remain unverified against their original and are routed to a new question, question-locate-kanevskii-senderov-1980-samizdat-original.
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