The quantifier
Video: Melanie GonickPolina Golland’s parents tell the story that, sometime in the early 1980s, when Polina was in junior high, she announced that she wanted to go to MIT. That’s an unusual plan for any 13- or 14-year-old to hatch independently, but particularly one living in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.Golland, now a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), grew up in Frunze (since renamed Bishkek), the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a city of about a million people. “It was actually European in nature,” Golland says. “It was mainly Russians.” Golland had what she calls a “happy childhood,” dominated by physics and math. Both of her parents were physics researchers — her father at a Kyrgyz university and her mother in the National Academy of Sciences — and...