Two-time Yulia’s Dream participant Sophia Breslavets appreciates joining a global math community.
When Sophia Breslavets first heard about Yulia’s Dream, the MIT Department of Mathematics’ Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (PRIMES) for Ukrainian students, Russia had just invaded her country, and she and her family lived in a town 20 miles from the Russian border.
Breslavets had attended a school that emphasized mathematics and physics, took math classes on weekends and during summer breaks, and competed in math Olympiads. “Math was really present in our lives,” she says.
But the war shifted her studies to online. “It still wasn’t like a fully functioning online school,” she recalls. “You can’t socialize.”
So she was grateful to be accepted to the MIT program in 2022. “Yulia’s Dream was a great thing to happen to me personally, because in the beginning, when the war was just starting, I didn’t know what to do. This was just a great thing to take your mind off of what’s going on outside your window, and you can just kind of get yourself into that and know that you have some work to do, and that was huge.”
Yulia Zdanovska, a 21-year-old Ukrainian mathematician, was killed by a Russian-fired missile in Kharkiv.
