Less than zero? Harsh. Rather than going through the list of USSR scientists & mathematicians who made titanic contributions, I'm just going to throw one unexp

Less than zero? Harsh. Rather than going through the list of USSR scientists & mathematicians who made titanic contributions, I'm just going to throw one unexpected name out there: Max Levchin. He is arguably the brains, and the irreducible core, of the movement that led ultimately to PayPal, the PayPal mafia, and every other startup & cultural influence that resulted from that. He has described having a strong math & science background as being important to him, and it was obviously at the very core of PayPal - like I said, the one irreducible piece of that was Levchin's math-based contributions. Arguably without Levchin there is no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no Reid Hoffman, not as names that we recognize, the list goes on... And if that doesn't count as influence in the larger society, I don't know what does.