In 1957, Anatolii Volodymyrovych Skorokhod began to lecture at Kiev University after his return from Moscow, where he had his postgraduate course. I was lucky to be among the first students at his lectures and, later on, to work under his leadership at the Institute of Mathematics in Kyiv and, for more than 30 years (from the end of 1950s), to observe the process of birth and formation of the Kyiv probabilistic school and the exceptional role played in this process by Skorokhod’s scientific activity, his original ideas, and the exclusiveness of his personality.

At the third year of my studies, a new specialization ("probability theory") was organized at the faculty, and 10 students of our group were enrolled to it. Every semester, we had some special courses. Anatolii Volodymyrovych constantly read special courses. We were quite diligent and also attended his lectures at another, younger, course. That lectures were not similar to those which he read for our group. They had a lot of new facts, and even those facts that he gave at our lectures, were argued, as a rule, differently.

In September 1960, six of us, fourth-year students, had a pleasant surprise: we were recommended by the faculty students’ scientific society to the scientific conference in Vilnius. Those were the memorable days for me, really a holiday which is always with me. First of all, we had the opportunity to become acquainted with Lithuania, such a distinctive country, and to feel the patriotic spirit of the Lithuanians. On the other hand, these days in Vilnius gathered all the best creative forces of the Soviet Union, a large cohort of young talented persons, who worked in the field of probability theory, so passionate, as if they shone by creative ideas.

Among other wonderful events of those days, I was very impressed by Skorokhod’s lecture. He said about the estimation of probabilities that the sequence of normalized sums of independent identically distributed random variables were between certain curved boundaries. To solve this problem, he suggested to replace the sequences of the sums by the values of the Brownian motion process at certain random points of time such that the distributions of both the sequences coincided. But we already knew these results from his lectures at the special course! It turned out that these beautiful elegant theorems were his own and were just born! But we believed that they were already well-known ... So we opened that Anatolii Volodymyrovych had also acquainted us with his own results at our special courses! [It is worth noting that the idea of this Skorokhod’s result later on became the basis for a new direction of research in the theory of random processes and this direction is called “Skorokhod embedding problem”].

At the Kiev University, there was a tradition of "The Last Bell". Before the last winter session, one of the lecturers appealed to the students with a farewell speech. Moreover, the students themselves elected the lecturer for the Last Bell speech and invited him. In December 1961, the students of our course invited Skorokhod to read such a lecture, because he was our first lecturer at 1957.

All the participants of this action (students and lecturers) gathered in the large audience. Skorokhod’s speech was very bright and thoughtful. He spoke about the nature of mathematics, its difference from other sciences. Its main points are the following:

Mathematics has no authority. Mathematician never says: "This thought is right, because some respectable person considered so”. In mathematics, each assertion must be logically proven. Mathematics develops the logical thinking, so, regardless of the need for its direct application, all the persons who need the ability to think logically have to know mathematics.  No wonder that Abraham Lincoln being a President of the United States had studied the "Geometry" by Euclid. Mathematics contributes to the development of science in general, technology development, and human development. In our progressive movement, we are going to build a better society, and the role of mathematics will be increased with the time in this track. Mathematics thrills, it has its own laws of development and its uniqueness.  

- "While you are young, - Skorokhod appealed to the audience, - and are not burdened by the need to take care of the earnings for keeping the family, try to penetrate deeper into the essence of mathematics and to appreciate its beauty."

The official boss, the Dean of the faculty, did not like this speech. He had a speech after Skorokhod and subjected the first speaker to a sharp criticism. His was outraged by the indifference of the previous speaker in politics, who did not even mention the benefits of our social system relative to a capitalism and, speaking of a better future, did not even pronounced the word "communism"! "This speech, - said the Dean, - could pronounce a teacher from capitalist countries, such as, for example, the U.S.A."

We all were sitting as electrified. Finally, I could not stand and wrote a note to the Dean that we, the students, did not agree with his assessment of Skorokhod’s speech, that he spoiled us all the holiday of the Last Bell. After reading my note, the Dean immediately went out. The meeting was closed immediately.

I had considerable troubles because of my quick temper. But this history gave rise to my civic enlightenment, understanding that there is an extensive system of pressure on people in our society.

Halyna Syta