I have two related stories, one is my MO question:

Does anyone have access to a copy of Yury G. Teterin's 1984 (Russian) preprint "Representation of numbers by spinor genera"

The other was a 1930's article in Ukrainian, as I recall, that is not critical. I do not seem to have kept the email from that far back. Anyway, a friend of a friend of a friend was at a different university in Ukraine, and was willing to find the item and scan it in and email the pdf.

One thing I did wrong with the latter item (but chronologically earlier) was to try to rope a bunch of people into contributing to translating the item, including A. Eremenko at Purdue. That did not work and was not appreciated. So, a translation or part of one is a bigger deal, by far, than an article scan. My friend Dmitry read me selected sentences by telephone but indicated it gave him a headache, some words being uncertain anyway as differing from Russian. As clumsy as I was, this was worth doing, nobody knew about this article.

So I guess my summary is, people who have some involvement with mathematics are pretty generous about scanning in articles for people they will never meet. However, it does not do to get greedy with the kindness of strangers.

I have two related stories, one is my MO question:

Does anyone have access to a copy of Yury G. Teterin's 1984 (Russian) preprint "Representation of numbers by spinor genera"

The other was a 1930's article in Ukrainian, as I recall, that is not critical. I do not seem to have kept the email from that far back. Anyway, a friend of a friend of a friend was at a different university in Ukraine, and was willing to find the item and scan it in and email the pdf.

One thing I did wrong with the latter item (but chronologically earlier) was to try to rope a bunch of people into contributing to translating the item, including A. Eremenko at Purdue. That did not work and was not appreciated. So, a translation or part of one is a bigger deal, by far, than an article scan. My friend Dmitry read me selected sentences by telephone but indicated it gave him a headache, some words being uncertain anyway as differing from Russian. As clumsy as I was, this was worth doing, nobody knew about this article.

So I guess my summary is, people who have some involvement with mathematics are pretty generous about scanning in articles for people they will never meet. However, it does not do to get greedy with the kindness of strangers.

I have two related stories, one is my MO question:

Does anyone have access to a copy of Yury G. Teterin's 1984 (Russian) preprint "Representation of numbers by spinor genera"

The other was a 1930's article in Ukrainian, as I recall, that is not critical. I do not seem to have kept the email from that far back. Anyway, a friend or a friend of a friend was at a different university in Ukraine, and was willing to find the item and scan it in and email the pdf.

One thing I did wrong with the latter item (but chronologically earlier) was to try to rope a bunch of people into contributing to translating the item, including A. Eremenko at Purdue. That did not work and was not appreciated. So, a translation or part of one is a bigger deal, by far, than an article scan. My friend Dmitry read me selected sentences by telephone but indicated it gave him a headache, some words being uncertain anyway as differing from Russian. As clumsy as I was, this was worth doing, nobody knew about this article.

So I guess my summary is, people who have some involvement with mathematics are pretty generous about scanning in articles for people they will never meet. However, it does not do to get greedy with the kindness of strangers.

I have two related stories, one is my MO question:

Does anyone have access to a copy of Yury G. Teterin's 1984 (Russian) preprint "Representation of numbers by spinor genera"

The other was a 1930's article in Ukrainian, as I recall, that is not critical. I do not seem to have kept the email from that far back. Anyway, a friend of a friend of a friend was at a different university in Ukraine, and was willing to find the item and scan it in and email the pdf.

One thing I did wrong with the latter item (but chronologically earlier) was to try to rope a bunch of people into contributing to translating the item, including A. Eremenko at Purdue. That did not work and was not appreciated. So, a translation or part of one is a bigger deal, by far, than an article scan. My friend Dmitry read me selected sentences by telephone but indicated it gave him a headache, some words being uncertain anyway as differing from Russian. As clumsy as I was, this was worth doing, nobody knew about this article.

So I guess my summary is, people who have some involvement with mathematics are pretty generous about scanning in articles for people they will never meet. However, it does not do to get greedy with the kindness of strangers.