Report of the international advisory board

The Board is very much impressed by the current state of academic affairs at the Department. Within 5 years of its creation, the HSE has become the leading Russian institution of higher learning in pure mathematics.

The International Advisory Board of the Faculty of Mathematics has been created in 2011. Members of the International Advisory Board include Pierre Deligne (Institute for Advanced Study, USA), Sergey Fomin (University of Michigan, USA), Sergei Lando (HSE, Dean of the Department, ex officio), Tetsuji Miwa (Kyoto University, Japan), Andrei Okounkov (Columbia University, USA), Stanislav Smirnov (University of Geneva, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg State University, Russia). Chairman of the Board: Stanislav Smirnov (elected February 17, 2013). 

Members of the Board visited the Department in Winter 2013. They met with faculty members, both junior and senior ones, and with students, both undergraduate and graduate. During these meetings, conducted in the absence of departmental administration, the students and professors freely expressed their opinions regarding the current state of affairs in the Department, commenting on its achievements, its goals, and its most pressing needs and problems. 

GENERAL ASSESSMENT
The Board is very much impressed by the current state of academic affairs at the Department. Within 5 years of its creation, the HSE has become the leading Russian institution of higher learning in pure mathematics. 

We are most impressed by the Department's undergraduate program which is, in our opinion, among the best ones in the world. It currently attracts the strongest pool of mathematics students in Russia, offering them a challenging and thoughtfully designed curriculum. In terms of research strength, the Department (including faculty members at satellite branches at Steklov and Kharkevich Institutes) may well belong to the top 100 mathematics departments at research universities worldwide. 

The Department's graduate-level programs are still in their infancy, and are yet to achieve comparable status. 

Full text of the report