Ilya's Illustrated History

I was born in a country far, far away... My home town had been the capital of this country for a long time, but now it rightfully claims the title of the cultural and beer capital. It is famous for its museums, white nights, and breweries.

This is a link to my high school. It was generally considered as one of the best schools in the city where kids could study math and physics. Boris Grebenshikov and Yuri Matiyasevich were among its alumni. However, I had been introduced to mathematics even earlier, in a math circle. I am still indebted to my teachers (Anna Bogomolnaya, Evgeny Abakumov, and Lev Parnes) for the momentum that has lasted for years.

I learned how to program a computer in a palace. Exterior pleasant view gives a wrong impression of the computers that were inside. Displays were green and today's pagers have more memory than those PCs. Despite their low speed and a joy of sharing a personal computer with other twenty eager boys, it was fascinating.

I entered the city's biggest university later on. This university had a campus in the countryside. The students could enjoy a view of wrangling horses from the classrooms and an hour train commute. It is no wonder that Boris Grebenshikov and Yuri Matiyasevich studied there too.

I'll be succinct about the contests I won. Just a couple of photos.


International Olympiad in Informatics, 1993.	Vice-champions of the ACM world, 1998.

In the mean time I lived for quite a while in the capital of a hexagonal country. I learned its funny language, where words have twice as many letters as sounds, and I had a good time there. I worked in a small company, which later merged with a bigger one but is still in the same business it has been since 1987.

Unlike many in the trade, I didn't drop out of school. I wrote my MS thesis (Gregory Tseytin was my advisor) and got a diploma. It was of distinction due to its red color. Tseytin and I also worked in a small spin-off of a big company. This company produced small chips and expensive satellite phones. Chips were good, phones sucked.

To learn more and to change the world I moved to another university on the other side of the globe. It is located in a region of red roofs, azure sky, and transplanted palms. A city nearby formely known as the cradle of the new economy has become its graveyard. In the new university I became a Ph.D. candidate and Dan Boneh's student. Dan Boneh chose to hide his identity behind a BSD devil. He is a crypto person.

As if I were not happy there, after a year I came back to the Old World, though only for one summer. This time it was a tiny country, known for its watches, cheese, and money laundering. This country being a confederation boasts a diversity of its people, languages, and laws unmatched by any other developed nation. A picturesque ten minute walk from the place I worked at to Thomas Mann's tombstone was the highlight of my weekdays.

Three most amazing years and a few papers later I am ready to jump off the cliff into the real world. I can't wait to read the next paragraph on this page.

The next paragraph? You may find it here.

Crypto Group