Incidentally, the guy who wrote RAR (and an incredibly great file manager for Windows, FAR Manager), Eugene Roshal, has studied at the very same faculty/specialty as I did. However, he had graduated before I entered the university.

> For some reason, it seems the former USSR is highly prominent in compression algorithms.

I’d take a wild guess that it has to do with making more with having less, such as access to larger storage volumes or broadband.

Specific to compression, when you’re “tech poor”, the time you spend waiting for data to get processed is essentially free.

At the time those algorithms where developed even computers / networks in the West were painfully slow, compression always had its use.

zstd is developed at Facebook, not known for a lack of computing resources.

Still, even if you can reduce data footprint on Facebook by 1%, that's the GDP of a small planet right there.

> the former USSR is highly prominent in compression algorithms

And, which is quite odd, a lot of proprietary Windows software.

I could take a wild guess as to your last statement. From a little bit that I've read, maths in the USSR were taught differently than in the west. I remembering reading somewhere that they were teaching kids discrete math in elementary/middle school. A topic that is big in CompSci and also a topic I didn't know anything about until my sophomore year at university. If that is true, I would say this may be why, but that is just speculation.