In the summer of 1991, the Russian mathematician Andrey Terekhov stood in the middle of a potato field outside St. Petersburg. As he scanned the dry, nearly infertile land, he felt a sense of humiliation. "I, a world-famous professor, was preparing potatoes," he recalls. Terekhov, the creator of key telecommunications systems for the KGB, had been a mentor to hundreds of Russia's best mathematical minds. But in post-Soviet Russia, the government had stopped paying him the small salary that he had earned as a professor at St. Petersburg State University. So he had forfeited a labor of love -- the study of algorithms, geometry, the theory of graphs -- for hard labor.

Then something occurred that changed Terekhov's life. Two American IT executives traveled to St. Petersburg to find the mathematician. They wanted to hire Terekhov to tackle a problem that was confounding U.S. programmers -- and frustrating many large U.S. corporations. The problem was as simple as it was dire: Computers and software languages were evolving so fast that companies were accumulating vital programs, and critical business data, in languages that were going out of date. Well before the Internet frenzy -- which only made the problem worse -- companies were struggling with how to translate their financial records, their inventory systems, and the programs that ran their factories into new, more flexible languages.

The standard solution was clumsy and expensive: Fill a room with engineers, have them manually dissect an existing program -- and then have them manually rewrite that program in a new language. It took too much time, it cost too much money, it resulted in buggy code, and it was unrewarding for the people who did it. (It was the programming equivalent of potato farming.) The American executives had heard that Terekhov might be able to automate the entire conversion process. The Russian jumped at the chance: "What else could I say but 'Yes,' " he recalls.

Ten years, three companies, and several versions of software later, Terekhov and the team that he assembled have created a product, RescueWare 6.0, that does for software languages what science-fiction writers have imagined machines doing for human languages: translate one into another quickly and seamlessly. Thanks to RescueWare, information that was previously locked in mainframes can now be displayed on Web pages, and programs that used to run only on big boxes in COBOL can now run on servers in Java.

RescueWare is a huge innovation -- one that has already had a tremendous impact on Terekhov. The 51-year-old mathematician, who resembles a smiling Fidel Castro, now earns 10 times as much as the going wage for a Russian mathematics professor. He runs Lanit-Tercom, a St. Petersburg-based telecommunications-software company. He owns a four-story house with a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, a basketball court -- and no potatoes in the yard. Meanwhile, the two men who sought him out, Vivek Wadhwa and Len Erlikh, run a company called Relativity Technologies, which produces and sells RescueWare. Based in Cary, North Carolina, Relativity has a client list that includes Charles Schwab, Ernst & Young, and the U.S. Air Force. Wadhwa and Erlikh compare Terekhov's achievement to cracking the atom. "This guy is a Russian Einstein," says Wadhwa, 43, CEO.