Our Web site is written for the most part in Russian. (Some Russian texts on www.mccme.ru/ium are in KOI8-R encoding, which is standard for network communications; if your computer does have Russian fonts try setting KOI8-R encoding in your browser.) Those who cannot read Russian are referred to the English version of our page, but they should be warned that nothing but general information on IUM is to be found there. (If you read French or German, you can visit our French or German pages, but what you are going to see there is not exactly math.) The rest of this text is for those who can read Russian but cannot make their Web browser show Cyrillic letters to them.
An immense part of our Web page is lists of titles of courses read (or being read) at the Independent University. Most of these course titles are provided with a link to a page containing a more detailed description of the course. Typically, it is the course syllabus, but in many cases important additional material is provided, such as lecture notes, exercises, etc.
(Most of) the syllabi are written in Russian; no English translation is provided, and you will not be able to read them without Cyrillic fonts installed. On the other hand, all the extra stuff (lecture notes etc.), which is also (with few exceptions) in Russian, is stored as Postscript files; this Postscript should print correctly on any Postscript printer, and one can view the file on the screen with a program like ghostview (even if your printer and/or computer does not have cyrillic fonts!). Some of these Postscript files are packed by the gzip utility instead of zip, as in the X-archive; these files can be viewed directly, too, but one cannot send them to printer without unpacking.
To help you find these postsript files, we provided some links with an English translation. If you follow these links, you will arrive at a link to a Postscript text you can read in Russian (and/or a syllabus in English). For your convenience, all such links are made accessible from one page: just click here and look for English words in the chaos of bizzare characters you see on the screen!
It should be noted that each Postscript file is stored on our Web site in two forms: Postscript "as is" (or gzipped: see above), to be read from the screen (if your Web browser allows it) and zipped Postscript, to be downloaded to your computer (after which you can unzip it and view or print).
We realize that this scheme is far from being perfect, but it's better than nothing.