---
title: "Do primary/scholarly sources confirm that Mekh-mat's 'coffin problems' were deliberately unsolvable problems used to fail Jewish applicants?"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_raised: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["history-of-mathematics","soviet-union","antisemitism","academia","verification"]
answered_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]]."
---


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:**

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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]].