4 ms·

This is funny to me because as someone who has gone through some of his differential geometry & topology books, they're actually quite good. Another example of

This is funny to me because as someone who has gone through some of his differential geometry & topology books, they're actually quite good. Another example of being excellent in one area yet lacking in others (perhaps overconfidence/ego too stemming from being excellent in one area?). I guess the type of nationalism he grew up under in the USSR also didn't help, I know a few other people who have very strange views on history and conspiracies relating to it.

gilleain 4y ago
His artwork is also amazing. Somehow only a topologist could make works like it (i feel). I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with different names seems quite mathematical.
- ncann 4y ago
  The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely detached from the real world.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    it is also very very liberal in interpretation of facts. so, 2 sequences of kings reigns, one is 10, 30, 7, 25 years, another is 8, 45, 9, 20. according to Fomenko's methodology, these are copies of the same event, because it is a short reign - long reign - short reign - long reign.
    - enriquto 4y ago
      It makes sense, in a way. His starting hypotheses is that all historical record has been falsified (names changed, dates changed or invented, etc). Yet, there is some information that can still be extracted from the historical corpus of falsified texts, by studying the statistically significant correlations between series of events. That is, correlations that would be nearly impossible to occur in purely invented events. As a working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding the enigma cypher! Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons that he must surely explain elsewhere. I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic. But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton also famously worked in stuff that we consider crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh), alchemy, occultism, etc.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        Well, Fomenko attacks all methods of dating events for their drawbacks, but the core of his theory is very vulnerable to being self-contradictory. He doesn't trust the narrative sources when it comes to names and such, considering that Genghis Khan and Ceasar and Jesus Christ to be one person (names picked from the top of my head, but such conjunctions are typical to F.) based on similarities in reign lengths, but he somehow trusts that descriptions of astronomical events to be very exact. Like, source claimes that during Fukidides eclipse there were stars visible, but modern calculation shows that at most Venus could be visible. So he discards 1500 years of history because of that plural wording. So ancient scribes took extreme liberties with names of rulers and countries, but somehow preserved the plural form of a noun 100% verbatim. And he also completely ignores all non-narrative historical documents, like financial receipts, sales invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister sect in 18th century which decided to falsify all history.
        enriquto 4y ago
        Heh, I'm not supporting Fomenko's chronology, it seems totally bonkers to me. Still, I'd love to be able to talk to him and listen what he has to say about all these questions that you mention. Or, even better, since he new Vladimir Arnold (they wrote a book together), I'm extremely curious to know whether they talked about history, and what did Arnold think about Fomenko's theories; being a remarkably down-to-earth fellow, for sure he wasn't having any kind of bullshit. In my mind, Arnold mercilessly mocked Fomenko's shit, and Fomenko's couldn't do anything but self-deprecatingly joke about himself, defenseless in front of the greater man.
        Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        My personal theory is that Fomenko had figured out the errors in his books pretty early, yet, they were very popular and he had established a very lucrative career for himself in the difficult 1990s, so he just continued to publish more books rehashing the same thing over and over and over again, despite knowing the theory to be false. In Russian bookstores of the period there were very long bookshelves filled with his books.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      Oh, and if it is 10, 28, 2, 7, 25 it is also the same sequence with 8, 45, 9, 29, because 10, (28 + 2), 7, 25 looks similar enough. That extra number was a clear mistake.
adrian_b 4y ago
> "Fomenko has no historical background, and believes that most historical sources are lies anyhow." Because I have read some Soviet school manuals, which were full of shameless lies about most historical events (not only in the history manuals, but in all manuals, regardless of subject, e.g. in physics manuals, biology manuals and so on, and even in the sports manuals, where e.g. sports like boxing and skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English and the Norse), I find it easy to believe that someone who grew in the Soviet Union was convinced that all written history sources must contain only lies.
- kgeist 4y ago
  > full of shameless lies about most historical events ... skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English and the Norse I opened Wikipedia and immediately found this as the second sentence: "The earliest archaeological examples of skis were found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing They also mention China there. Sure attributing it to modern Slavs is anachronistic, but was there really such attribution in those school manuals you read? Or did they simply mean it was the territory of USSR where the first examples were found? It's modern skiing which was developed in Scandinavia. I'd say it's often quite the opposite, Western historiography is largely Eurocentric and disregards a lot of what happened in Asia/Africa.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    "Found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE" and "invented and developed by Russians" are not equivalent.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    No, in those manuals (from around 1965) there was nothing about archaeological discoveries. Moreover, the use of skis is not the same with organized skiing competitions and special training methods for them. Also, it was not enough to claim that all kinds of ancient inventions were due to Russians, the claims were that they were due to Russian peasants, because of course nothing good could have originated in Russian "enemies of the people", e.g. aristocrats or bourgeoisie.

gilleain 4y ago

His artwork is also amazing. Somehow only a topologist could make works like it (i feel). I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with different names seems quite mathematical.

ncann 4y ago
The article said basically the same thing, his "history" is just constructed through mathematical analysis and completely detached from the real world.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  it is also very very liberal in interpretation of facts. so, 2 sequences of kings reigns, one is 10, 30, 7, 25 years, another is 8, 45, 9, 20. according to Fomenko's methodology, these are copies of the same event, because it is a short reign - long reign - short reign - long reign.
  - enriquto 4y ago
    It makes sense, in a way. His starting hypotheses is that all historical record has been falsified (names changed, dates changed or invented, etc). Yet, there is some information that can still be extracted from the historical corpus of falsified texts, by studying the statistically significant correlations between series of events. That is, correlations that would be nearly impossible to occur in purely invented events. As a working principle it's very interesting. Like decoding the enigma cypher! Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons that he must surely explain elsewhere. I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic. But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton also famously worked in stuff that we consider crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh), alchemy, occultism, etc.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      Well, Fomenko attacks all methods of dating events for their drawbacks, but the core of his theory is very vulnerable to being self-contradictory. He doesn't trust the narrative sources when it comes to names and such, considering that Genghis Khan and Ceasar and Jesus Christ to be one person (names picked from the top of my head, but such conjunctions are typical to F.) based on similarities in reign lengths, but he somehow trusts that descriptions of astronomical events to be very exact. Like, source claimes that during Fukidides eclipse there were stars visible, but modern calculation shows that at most Venus could be visible. So he discards 1500 years of history because of that plural wording. So ancient scribes took extreme liberties with names of rulers and countries, but somehow preserved the plural form of a noun 100% verbatim. And he also completely ignores all non-narrative historical documents, like financial receipts, sales invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister sect in 18th century which decided to falsify all history.
      - enriquto 4y ago
        Heh, I'm not supporting Fomenko's chronology, it seems totally bonkers to me. Still, I'd love to be able to talk to him and listen what he has to say about all these questions that you mention. Or, even better, since he new Vladimir Arnold (they wrote a book together), I'm extremely curious to know whether they talked about history, and what did Arnold think about Fomenko's theories; being a remarkably down-to-earth fellow, for sure he wasn't having any kind of bullshit. In my mind, Arnold mercilessly mocked Fomenko's shit, and Fomenko's couldn't do anything but self-deprecatingly joke about himself, defenseless in front of the greater man.
        Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        My personal theory is that Fomenko had figured out the errors in his books pretty early, yet, they were very popular and he had established a very lucrative career for himself in the difficult 1990s, so he just continued to publish more books rehashing the same thing over and over and over again, despite knowing the theory to be false. In Russian bookstores of the period there were very long bookshelves filled with his books.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    Oh, and if it is 10, 28, 2, 7, 25 it is also the same sequence with 8, 45, 9, 29, because 10, (28 + 2), 7, 25 looks similar enough. That extra number was a clear mistake.

adrian_b 4y ago

> "Fomenko has no historical background, and believes that most historical sources are lies anyhow." Because I have read some Soviet school manuals, which were full of shameless lies about most historical events (not only in the history manuals, but in all manuals, regardless of subject, e.g. in physics manuals, biology manuals and so on, and even in the sports manuals, where e.g. sports like boxing and skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English and the Norse), I find it easy to believe that someone who grew in the Soviet Union was convinced that all written history sources must contain only lies.

kgeist 4y ago
> full of shameless lies about most historical events ... skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English and the Norse I opened Wikipedia and immediately found this as the second sentence: "The earliest archaeological examples of skis were found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing They also mention China there. Sure attributing it to modern Slavs is anachronistic, but was there really such attribution in those school manuals you read? Or did they simply mean it was the territory of USSR where the first examples were found? It's modern skiing which was developed in Scandinavia. I'd say it's often quite the opposite, Western historiography is largely Eurocentric and disregards a lot of what happened in Asia/Africa.
- kjs3 4y ago
  "Found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE" and "invented and developed by Russians" are not equivalent.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  No, in those manuals (from around 1965) there was nothing about archaeological discoveries. Moreover, the use of skis is not the same with organized skiing competitions and special training methods for them. Also, it was not enough to claim that all kinds of ancient inventions were due to Russians, the claims were that they were due to Russian peasants, because of course nothing good could have originated in Russian "enemies of the people", e.g. aristocrats or bourgeoisie.