‘I Always Look for Tasks That Involve the Creation of New Models’
The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters held a ceremonial meeting on September 13 at which it named HSE professor Fuad Aleskerov a foreign member. Aleskerov is a professor of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, head of the Department of Mathematics and director of the International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis. The list of the Academy’s foreign members began with mathematician Mstislav Keldysh, and in the 20 years since, only two more scientists have joined those ranks. In this interview, Fuad Aleskerov explains why he became a scientist, what his scientific interests are and what a mathematical model and a yellow dandelion have in common.
On Ties to Finland
I have long had ties with the Finnish side. We did not have large joint projects, but there were periods when I went there almost every year and spoke at seminars. They made me very comfortable there and didn’t even require that I teach. I have friends there whom I have known since 1983 — for almost 40 years.
Finland has a very strong group of political scientists and another of economists. Although I visited various universities, I mostly visited the University of Turku and have had close contact with a group there for many, many years. We have been working on a new project, but everything slowed down because of Covid. I hope that now it will get a little easier and work will continue.
On Membership in the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters
The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters primarily deals with the distribution of funds for scientific research and can turn to foreign members for consultation and advice. But its honorary function is probably most important. Academy members have a tradition of gathering once a year, with some members presenting honorary reports that are then discussed. I was supposed to be in Finland on September 13, but it was decided to hold the meeting online — and not for two days, but two hours.
On Scientific Interests
When I first came to the Institute of Control Sciences, to my dear teacher Mark Aizerman, he gave me two tasks from which to choose: one about optimal control (with which I was familiar), and a second that was completely new to me — modelling human behaviour. I didn’t know it was possible to use mathematics to model human behaviour. I am in love with this field to this day. I’ve done different things in this field, but this was what got me started.
The spectrum of my interests ranges from such sciences as history and biology to medicine and political science. This world is full of interesting questions
If I am interested in something, I’ll study it; if I’m not interested, I won’t. You could say this is my life credo. I sometimes compare myself to a dinosaur: I simply eat everything tasty in my path.
When a student comes to me and asks me to be his scientific advisor, I give him our preprints and some articles and invite him to look at them and decide for himself where his heart lies. If he feels drawn to a particular topic, that’s what he should study.
I have studied applied problems in various fields, but I have never done work in which you simply take data, stick it into a known model and get a result. That’s boring. I am always looking for tasks that involve the creation of new models. For example, a Western firm ordered models from us and we used a theory that I had developed years ago for a completely different field. I recently told my students that everything in such problems is based on mathematics, that you need to love and understand the math and be able to use it.
In general, do you know where all the science and all these models come from? Recall these words of the poet Anna Akhmatova:
I wish you knew the kind of garbage heap
Wild verses grow on, paying shame no heed,
Like yellow dandelions along a fence,
Like burdock and bindweed...
An angered yell, the bracing scent of tar,
And walls with runic mildew like a sign...
And soon a tender, testy poem answers
To your delight and mine.
It’s the same with science. Sometimes, models are taken completely out of nowhere, ‘like yellow dandelions along a fence’, and they just work.
On What Makes a Good Scientist
For economists, mathematics is the most important. As well as basic economic subjects. Economics without mathematics has come to an end: it no longer exists. I often visit Paris and I remember how the history of economics was taught there with the help of formulas. They explained in formulas how views have changed over the years.
Andrei Kolmogorov said at one of his lectures that a person cannot be a good mathematician without good cultural baggage, a foundation. As my colleagues and I left that lecture, we wondered what he meant. Wasn’t mathematics about proving theorems, a technique? So what does culture have to do with it?
We understood it only 10 years later: yes, you need technique to prove a theorem, but you need culture to formulate theorems.
I was well acquainted with Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow. He gave me a great deal of support and was extremely intelligent. He once sat down to work on my text immediately after a flight from the U.S. to Austria. I saw that he was having difficulty, that he had flown across the ocean and was tired. I asked him to postpone the editing. ‘No, no, sit down. I’ll fix everything’, he said. And believe me, he checked everything, right down to each comma. ‘It will be better like this. I’ll change this word a bit and make it better’, he said. That’s what it means to be a great scientist and a true intellectual.
And the human qualities for all scientists are identical: you have to be honest — it’s not even open for discussion. And, of course, you have to work hard.
On How to Succeed in Science
You ha to work hard, study and read a lot to know what everyone is doing. And look for interesting tasks. You shouldn’t waste your youth on tasks that no one needs, just to defend your thesis. I have a text called 'How to prepare and write a PhD thesis’ that I wrote in 2008 so that I wouldn’t have to tell my students the same thing every time. After that, two journals asked to publish it, and I still get responses to it.
To Be or Not to Be a Scientist?
This was never a question for me. As early as the fourth grade, people called me ‘professor’, so I had to live up to the name.
On How the Pandemic Has Affected Research
We do a lot of math on the blackboard: we discuss things, write something down. When I worked overseas, my co-author and I filled a blackboard with our notes and then left in the evening. When we returned, everything had been erased: the board had been washed clean. I nearly went crazy. The person who had cleaned up the room thought they were doing us a favour by cleaning the blackboard. Of course, we restored everything. That goes without saying, but after that, I said that nobody should touch the board. This part based on personal communication suffered greatly during the pandemic, but what you can do yourself, alone, has grown slightly as a result.
Of course, the Covid restrictions had a negative effect on teaching. It means a lot to be able to look into people's eyes and see whether they understood. I give lots of lectures, and if I see that something isn’t clear, I can immediately come up with an example, say something to explain it. It’s tough to teach math subjects when you don’t see students’ eyes. I just delivered a lecture offline and liked it: I looked at the students and saw that they understood everything. That means a lot.
On Plans for the Future
First, we have just completed a series of new works on networks that no one has ever done before. Second, seeing what’s happening in the world, I decided to work more on crisis management. I had worked in this field before also. My first work on regional ecology was in 1986. That was followed by a paper on earthquakes, and last year one on tornadoes. Now I’ve decided to focus even more closely on this because, judging by the climate changes we’re seeing, the problems are growing.
Fuad T. Aleskerov
Professor, Faculty of Economic Sciences