Yesterday and Long Ago Taschenbuch von Vladimir I. Arnold Spezial

History is not what we were wearing, It is how we had been utterly ruined. B.Pasternak.¿Spektorsky¿ In the spring of 1999 the police found me lying unconscious with a broken forehead next to my bike in the outskirts of Paris, and delivered me to a hospital. It took a few weeks for French doctors to bring me to consciousness. But I did not recognize my son and said about my wife: ¿this woman says that she is my wife¿. A doctor asked me how many years we had been married. I answered correctly, ¿twenty four¿, and the doctor wrote down: ¿arithmetical abilities are preserved¿. Later, French doctors told me that with such a trauma any Frenchman would succumb immediately. But then they added: ¿Russians are very tough so you should live several months more¿. In a Western textbook I had read regarding effects of poisons: ¿as for alcohol the lethal dose for Russians is several times higher¿. Perhaps the same applies to traumas. Zusammenfassung This charming book by Vladimir Igorevich Arnold, one of the leading mathematicians of our day, is a collection of his memories from early childhood up to recent days. Mathematicians will read it for the pure pleasure of learning more about one of their most eminent colleagues, and even the non-mathematical reader will find it very difficult to lay aside. It will be of value to historians of twentieth-century mathematics as source material.