About TV

Disclaimer 1. Dear Reader. If you are a friend of mine, then you know most of what follows, so that you do not have to continue. If you are not a friend of mine, then ... why would you care? Well, anyway. Proceed at your own risk. The story that follows is extremely incomplete, - I skip (or just briefly mention) the most important or personal parts. But what's left is partially correct.

I was born on Sakhalin Island, in the very Far East of Russia. Most people have little idea where Sakhalin is located, but I give you a hint: a small country named Japan happens to float nearby. Moreover, Russia and Japan have owned the island in turns for several times. The only major building left from the last Japanese period now serves as a local Museum, you can see it on the left. Other memories of my childhood include hiking and skiing in the mountains, swimming in the sea, standing in lines for butter, having shish-kebob picnics, boarding a tightly packed bus ("please breath out everybody"), and doing nothing during summer breaks. As you can see, Sakhalin is a very beautiful place if you are thinking over your vacation plans or want to invest some money into oil industry. Locals are mostly kind and helpful. They are usually quite patriotic, but cannot wait until they can move away from the island. Lots of snow and storms in winters, mild summers, week-long rains - this is Sakhalin's climate. Cooking College is a most advanced local educational institution. Several economics experiments did little good to local economy. Fortunately, there is still some salmon, crab, and oil left in the Okhotsk Sea.

While in middle school, I became interested in chemistry. Several times I nearly blew up the apartment building we used to live in, and a couple of times I polluted the neighborhood with various poisonous substances I synthesized (including potassium cyanide). Thus, it was probably good for the island's ecology when I left for Physics and Mathematics College in Academgorodok near Novosibirsk, where I was invited after rather unexpectedly winning a prize in a national mathematics Olympiad.

For the next decade I lived in Novosibirsk, so that I can rightfully call myself a Siberian. It is common knowledge that Siberia is cold. Siberians say, however: "In Siberia it is cold only for three months. For the rest of the year it is very cold". After graduating from Physics and Mathematics College, I went directly to the Mathematics Department of Novosibirsk State University, (which was just 200 meters away) to study for an undergraduate degree. NSU is ranked 4^th among all former USSR Universities. I rank it 1^st. A westerner would be surprised to learn that Mathematics Department is the largest department of NSU (followed by Physics Department). Thus, if you are looking for a place to study Sciences, you might consider Novosibirsk!

Many major events happened in my life while I was at NSU. In particular, I learned some math, found the point of life, fell in love, quit wrestling, performed in theatre plays, found several good friends, learned some math, fell in love, learned to play a guitar, chose an advisor, played football (soccer), lost the point of life, served in the Soviet Army for two years, fell in love, passed almost an infinite number of exams, found another point of life, got married, lost the point of life, changed an advisor, had my first paper published, got a daughter, found another point of life, learned some math, etc... This list is quite incomplete though...

Three months after I graduated from NSU, I found myself in a beautiful Gothic-style building in the middle of endless cornfields, - Mathematics Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana. It is a good University and a good place to study, since there is nothing else to do there anyway. Shortly after my arrival to Illinois I discovered some wonderful Western democracy values I had never seen before, like tuition, taxes, credit history, Math Department Saturday hike, and Interstate 74. I will always miss Urbana. I will also miss Indianapolis.

In 1999 I got my PhD, my wife got her M.S., and we moved from Illinois to Austin, Texas. Apparently, we like extremes: Texas is a very hot place, especially for Siberians. April through October one has to stay in an air-conditioned room. Staying outdoors for more than 15 minutes is simply dangerous! In a cold climate one can wear more clothes as a protection from cold, but nothing would protect you from Texas heat! We really missed walks in a park during summer months. Of course, there are also certain advantages: November through March the weather is very nice. We swam in Barton Creek on the New Year day of 2000! Actually, there are swimming pools everywhere, and we would go to a pool almost every day during summer. Our daughter learned to mimic Texan accent. Moreover, we even got a Texan in the family!

To cool down a little bit after Texas, in 2002 we moved to Edmonton, Canada. Edmonton is a Western version of Novosibirsk. The climate is similar to Siberian, but slightly warmer. One can still enjoy all the joys of winter such as skiing, skating, playing snowballs, driving on icy roads, etc. There are parks and nature preserves well within Edmonton city limits where you see no traces of civilization and no humans, but many squirrels and beavers. Also, Rocky Mountains are within approximately pi hour drive from Edmonton. We've been experimenting to make this measurement more precise. Local population is a curious mix of descendants of Gold Rush adventurers, Ukrainian and Polish settlers, oil industry workers, etc. University community is even more diverse though. At this moment Alberta is the richest province of Canada. Its wealth is mostly based on oil. It also saves a lot of money on education.

I enjoy mathematics. Though the more I learn, the better I realize how little I know. I wonder if the process ever converges? And where? My mathematics interests are mostly in functional analysis. I do not think it makes sense to go into details here, especially because I don't know who you are and what sort of details you would like to see. If you want to know more precisely what kind of math I am doing, please click here. To give you some idea, functional analysis deals with infinite dimensional spaces and operators on them, which can be often thought as matrices of infinite dimensions.

For most of my career, I've been teaching students. During years of teaching I've learned not to blame students when they write something like (sin x)/x = sin, but rather try to fix the faults of their school education (the only concept that is successfully taught in high schools is that "math is boring"). Moreover, I even got to enjoy teaching. I really hope that my former students still remember at least some of what I taught them, and use it well. If you are a former student of mine, and now, after having your education tested against your life experience, you've got some comments, ideas, or suggestions about the course, please send them to me.

I like traveling, but not as a tourist. Fortunately, if you do math, you have to travel to conferences. However, you do not really get to choose the destination, you just go wherever the conference happens to be. So that you might have to go to most unexpected places. But this makes things even more interesting. My impression of Edinburgh as of a dark city is probably justified by the fact that I could browse its Gothic-style streets only in late nights, after the conference talks were over. On the opposite, Ankara was sunny because the conference had several long tea breaks each day; Turkey was such a strange mix of oriental and western cultures! Vancouver was also a mix, or rather a mixture of equal parts of ocean and mountains, seasoned by beautiful weather. We have dared some long driving trips through the US and Canada, including a trip from Illinois prairies to the mountains and palms of California through New Mexico's deserts, Rockies, and Disneyland. A five day drive in a moving truck from Austin to Edmonton was also an adventure. It is impossible to list all our travel destinations here, to name just a few: New York, London, Athens, Washington D.C., Niagara Falls, Toronto, Halifax, San Francisco, Rodos, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Paris, etc.

When a student at Physics Mathematics School in Novosibirsk, I would often sneak into an NSU computer lab (even though school students were not officially allowed there). That's how I learned computer programming. Computers have been my hobby and a source of fun since then. And not only hobby: later I had to program in Assembly language for two years at a secret location. After I arrived to UI, I became a UNIX fan. I probably won't fit into a system administrator chair, but I've played a lot with kernels, shells, window managers, x-windows, startup files, environment variables, TeX, xemacs, C, MIME, etc., and I know some nice UNIX tricks. For example, I know how to delete all your files with a single command. Or, I know that if you scrollbar a baselineskip from debugging its environment through an x-window, then an irc xemacs from its default shell with an audiotool, and you'd better spellcheck you macros backwards until frames download. Tricks like this help me considerably in my work. And, of course, I am the system administrator of my home computer. Debian Linux, if you know what I am talking about.

Well, if you've got this far, then you must really want to know about me. One way to learn about someone is to look at his or her "like - don't like" list. The following lists are unordered, incomplete and incorrect. I like bounded operators, philosophical and political discussions, good books, teaching, chatting with friends and other smart people, mountains, reading news, red caviar, skiing, tea, Linux, and myself (sometimes). I don't like unbounded operators, INS, movies, grading, army, Microsoft Windows, and myself (sometimes).

Well, the story must have an end. Unfortunately, there is only one natural end for this kind of a story, and at the moment of writing this I am still alive. Therefore, for now I leave the story unfinished...

Last modified: Wed Jun 22 12:13:56 MDT 2011