A mathematician and avid communist in the Soviet Union, Sofya Yanovskaya was born in Bessarabia on this date in 1896. She became a Bolshevik during the Russian revolution and served as an officer in the Communist Party until 1924. Most of her career was spent at the Moscow State University as a scholar of the history, philosophy, and logic of mathematics. Yanovskaya participated for years in Party-run efforts to bring mathematics to “heel” alongside dialectical materialism and other aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet she ultimately became a defender of the scientific integrity of mathematics as an independent discipline. Her thirty-year task of editing Karl Marx’s mathematical writings enabled mathematicians in communist lands, especially in China during the Cultural Revolution, to defend their discipline as legitimate and in the interests of the working class. Yanovskaya was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1951, and in 1959 became the first chairperson of the newly created department of mathematical logic at Moscow State University.
“Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts must be seen as an outstanding model of dialectical practice, and read from the standpoint from which it was written — the struggle for dialectical theory as a guide to revolutionary social practice.” —Andy Blunden