Alex Eskin's day is not divided into starter-main-dessert but paced by work: the morning coffee that fires the neurons, the snack grabbed between two sessions at the blackboard, the long studious snack, and then — on festive days — the return to the flavors of his Moscow childhood around the family table. Three poles intersect: the Russo-Soviet cuisine inherited from Moscow where he was born in 1965, the sober daily life of the American academic (Princeton, Chicago, Stanford), and research stays at IHÉS in France.

Universal fuel for mathematicians. The Hungarian Alfréd Rényi said that "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems" — a phrase often attributed to Paul Erdős. For Eskin, coffee is not a drink but a collective ritual: it is around shared cups in common rooms and seminar breaks that ideas mature, like those that led to the "magic wand theorem" with Maryam Mirzakhani.