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- Peter the Great founded the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724, prioritizing mathematics to modernize the state.
- Christian Wolff recruited Daniel and Nikolaus Bernoulli from Basel to the St. Petersburg Academy, bringing Leonhard Euler as a young prodigy.
- Euler spent 31 years in Russia, mastering Russian, producing most of his 900 works, and training the first generation of Russian mathematicians.
- Euler defended Mikhail Lomonosov against Academy officials, recognizing his genius and preventing his marginalization.
- Mikhail Ostrogradsky became the first native Russian mathematician of European caliber, known for the divergence theorem (Gauss–Ostrogradsky), variational calculus, Ostrogradsky's instability theorem, and founding Russian mathematical physics.
- Viktor Bunyakovsky contributed the Cauchy–Bunyakovsky inequality, the Bunyakovsky conjecture on prime-valued polynomials, early probability theory texts, and served as a stabilizing institutional leader.
- Nikolai Lobachevsky invented hyperbolic (non-Euclidean) geometry, challenging the parallel postulate, but faced rejection in Russia; his work was later validated by Beltrami, Klein, and Poincaré.
- Pafnuty Chebyshev established the St. Petersburg school, excelling in number theory, probability, and approximation, and trained students like Markov, Lyapunov, and Steklov.
- Moscow mathematics developed later with Dmitry Egorov and Nikolai Luzin, who introduced set theory and measure theory from France, founding the Moscow school of mathematics.