The smartest Russian, Vitalik Buterin grew up and was educated in Canada. Coincidence?
o rly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman
Fair enough. Perelman is no slouch.
For a country with the population of Russia though, they don't do so well.
Meanwhile, half of the original Silicon Valley was educated at The University of Western Ontario or the University of Waterloo. The rest came mostly from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan at Dearborn. That's not counting Stanford of course. The were the destination.
Many of our best minds were scooped up by the Americans (and their money) in the 1960s. At the time we called it the brain drain.
Canada doesn't have a monopoly on smart people but on a basis of population we're still well ahead of the Russians