Nikolai Durov

Nikolai Valeryevich Durov (Russian: Никола́й Вале́рьевич Ду́ров; born 21 November 1980) is a Russian programmer and mathematician. He is the elder brother of Pavel Durov, together with whom he founded the social networking site VK^[1] and later Telegram.^[2]

Early life and education

In 1996, 1997 and 1998 Durov participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning a gold medal in each of the three contests he took part in.^[3] (where his contestant name was Nikolai Dourov.) In 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 he won one gold and three silver medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics.^[4] He had been a member of Saint-Petersburg State University ACM team, which won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2000^[5] and 2001.^[6]

He received his first PhD from Saint-Petersburg State University in 2005. He continued his mathematical education at the University of Bonn having received another PhD under supervision of Gerd Faltings.^[7]

Career

Research

Durov introduced commutative algebraic monads as a generalization of local objects in a generalized algebraic geometry.^[8] Versions of a tropical geometry, of an absolute geometry over a field with one element and an algebraic analogue of Arakelov geometry were realized in this setup.

He holds the position of a senior research fellow at the laboratory of algebra at the St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences.^[9]

Other work

Durov worked as a lead developer of the VKontakte.ru team until 2013.^[10]

Durov founded Telegram and developed the MTProto protocol for Telegram in 2013.

References