The interview of Andrew Schumann, the managing editor of Studia Humana with dr. Valery Tsepkalo, the Director of Hi-Tech Park Administration (Minsk, Belarus).
Andrew Schumann: The school of Soviet mathematics gave a huge number of important theorems proved in different areas including as well branches connected to IT-theory such as theory of recursion functions, theory of automata, non-classical logics, group theory, graph theory, etc. This school was very strong, maybe one of the strongest all over the world in theory of IT, but not in praxis of IT. How can you estimate abilities of recent Belarusian mathematicians working in the IT sphere? Can Belarus become sometime a leader in IT and appear more effective than for example even India? Can Belarus produce own IT?
Valery Tsepkalo: In order to develop information technologies and implement them we should have something else, not only talented mathematicians and engineers. I agree with estimations belonging to Walter Isaacson who named Steve Jobs and Bill Gates supernovae, superstars. They appeared, lighted up, because all – space, time, person – should have converged in one point so that the creative idea would be fruitful. And for them all converged indeed. When someone tells me, let us make so that in the Hi-Tech Park of Belarus Apple will appear, I emphasize: let us start with small project – let us create, for example, the company like Boeing in Belarus which will supply all merchant fleet all over the world and which will produce lunar rockets, etc. And so now Boeing is only 1/12 of company like Apple. Why do we want to start up with something large? Let be with something small so that to fly to Mars and to Moon. The problem is that the appearance of the largest IT-companies was a phenomenon which could not be predicted. Similar phenomena arise suddenly and not clearly how. Therefore any expecting that a theoretical product can lead to similar results, I would not accept.