The dissertations are all here

Day two, and the file I asked for yesterday did not thicken, so I walked to a different building on Shevchenko Street and finally asked a question I should have asked years ago. The academy library here keeps the complete run of dissertations defended in the academy of this republic. Every one. Not a selection and not a highlight reel: the whole shelf of people who once had to prove something in front of a committee.

My book is about a machine that counted in threes and about why the other number systems lost. I came in with two names I have been carrying since Bishkek. Almaty is where a piece of that question sat down and stayed. Akushsky set up the laboratory of machine and computational mathematics here on the eighth of March 1954, having been brought over from Moscow the year before, and he is the man behind the Soviet work on residue arithmetic. He went back after two or three years. Amerbayev stayed with it, defended in 1971, and his arithmetic ended up inside a real processor.

The library's website runs only over plain http and the parent domain has stopped resolving altogether, which tells you how well this material is kept and how badly. The paper is fine. The paper is excellent. What is missing is anybody's appetite for it. I ordered four things and got three. I stayed until they turned the corridor lights down.