Sergei Lando Celebrates His 60th Birthday
On July 9, Professor and first dean of the HSE’s Faculty of Mathematics Sergei Lando celebrates his 60th birthday.
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‘At home in childhood I was surrounded by math books, and I found solving problems really interesting. Becoming a mathematician was the only path for me in life,’ Lando says in his book ‘HSE Generation. Teachers on Teachers’, published to mark HSE’s 20th anniversary.
Now it seems that the University was also destined to open a mathematics department, as seven years ago this task, of setting up some competition for the Mechanical Mathematics Department or the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology may have seemed overly ambitious.
Professor Lando’s key to success, as a student of the respected academic Vladimir Arnold, is in the team of teachers he was able to gather at the faculty. ‘For several years in a row we have been able to attract talented students to the faculty’ he said. ‘This kind of stability would have been impossible without first-class teachers. The range of our professors and associate professors has grown significantly, including as a result of attracting very strong professors from abroad.’
Sergei started teaching very early, when he was in his second year at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, teaching eighth graders. ‘I was there to teach them that math exists, it is beautiful and interesting; some people are able to perceive that, and I had a completely natural desire to communicate it to them.’
Communicating the ‘beauty of mathematics’ is something Lando is really good at. The Fields Medal Committee, which inspected the faculty, recognized the BA course as among the top 100 best mathematics faculties in the world. And mathematical research at HSE today involves renowned researchers such as Professor Fedor Bogomolov (who heads the International Laboratory of Algebraic Geometry and its Applications), and Fields Medal winner Andrey Okounkov (who heads the International Laboratory of Representation Theory and Mathematical Physics).
Sergei Lando was awarded the HSE Medal (II Class) for his work to set up the Mathematics Faculty. ‘I am confident that in the future mathematics at HSE will continue to develop, and that this development will benefit both HSE and mathematics,’ he said, accepting the award at a recent Academic Council meeting.
Congratulations!
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