Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The sixth issue of HERB dedicated to mathematics is now available. There are three sections in the issue. The first section is devoted to the analysis of mathematical education in the USSR and modern Russia, the second one features the career opportunities for those, who received mathematical education in Russia, and the third section describes the current situation with mathematics in universities.

of Russian parents help their school-age children with their homework, or even do it with them.

The only way to detect weaknesses in one’s own ideas is to expose them to criticism from colleagues, says Eric Maskin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007, Chairman of the HSE International Advisory Committee, and chief researcher at the International Laboratory of Decision Choice and Analysis. The HSE news service recently spoke with him and Fuad Aleskerov, head of the Laboratory, about the the value of other people's opinions, joint research projects and opportunities for international cooperation in our time.

The Russian family has been becoming more demographically heterogeneous over recent years. Some of the families follow the trend of having many children: women more often give birth to a third and fourth child, and the gap between births is decreasing, which makes the evolution of the family faster. At the same time, younger generations are inclined to postpone marriage and having their first child, which leads either to later motherhood or to childlessness. This means that two opposite trends are developing; along with the growing share of ‘Western-type’ families, with postponed parenthood and fewer children, there is a revival of the traditional family with more children, Sergey Zakharov, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, reported.

of representatives of small manufacturing companies who are prepared to take out long-term loans to develop and modernize their operations would agree to do so at rates comparable to the current rates of 18-21%.

Many management students have difficulties predicting their career paths for the next five or ten years. Some of the students obviously have big hoped for their future and are confident about rapid career growth. They believe that by 30 they will be able to become top-level managers in medium and big organizations, and will never repeat the mistakes of their principals and teachers. Svetlana Satikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Management of HSE in St. Petersburg, studied the career expectations of future managers.

of Russians agree that too much importance today is attached to the achievements of science and technology, which is to the detriment of the spiritual side of life.

From November 14 - 24th a series of lectures on 'Diversity and Uniformity in Linguistic Sound Systems' by Ian Maddieson, Adjunct Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, Adjunct Professor Emeritus at the University of California was held at the HSE School of Linguistics. The course was dedicated to the phonetic diversity of languages and included eight lectures. During the series, Professor Maddieson talked to HSE English News Editor, Anna Chernyakhovskaya’s questions about his research into the relations between language and environment.