Mathematics as Problem Solving.

Abstract

I was born in 1907 in the little village Strizhevka in the Ukraine.From the age of three, I was taught at the Cheder (elementary school by a synagogue), and since that time I have been painting.At the age of ten, I entered Feinstein's Jewish High School in the city of Vinniza.The art teacher, Abram Markovich Cherkassky, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts at St. Petersburg, looked at my book of sketches of praying Jews, and consequently taught me for six years, until his departure for Kiev.Cherkassky was my first and most important teacher.He not only critiqued my work and explained various techniques, but used to sit down in my place and correct mistakes in my work until it was nearly unrecognizable.I couldn't then touch my work and continue -this was unforgettable.In 1924, when I was 17, my relative, the American biologist, who later won the Nobel Prize in 1952, Selman A. Waksman, offered to take me to the United States to study and become an artist, and to introduce me to Chagall