I was born in a provincial town of Noginsk, Moscow region. Soon my family moved to nearby Chernogolovka - that time a small village set up literally in the forest to develop the Soviet Physics and Chemistry. Among others, my father (a chemical physicist) and my mother (a physical chemist) were supposed to push (and what they having been doing for all their lives) the Soviet Science further and further (or higher and higher?)... It must be that time I have realized the fundamental advantage of Mathematics over Physics, Chemistry or, say, Soviet Philosophy: all you really need to have is a sheet of paper and a pencil (often some brains also), but not an expensive equipment, rare substances or knowledge by heart of the works of Marx and Lenin.

So I entered Mechanics and Mathematics department of the Moscow State University (MSU) and received the MSc degree in Mathematics in 1984 and PhD degree in Mathematics and Physical Sciences 1988. Now I see how lucky I was - in a few years to come Perestroika and what has followed would disperse the best minds of the teaching staff all around the World (better to say the West)! My direct supervisors were (now Professors) Mikhail Menshikov, Stanislav Molchanov and Vadim Malyshev to whom I deeply grateful. That time I spent my nights not only with a guitar with the Student Theater of MSU but was also trying to discover a model in the Percolation theory which I could solve. At the daytime I attended courses of Academicians Andrei Kolmogorov and Boris Gnedenko, Pavel Alexandroff and Nikolai Efimov, Alexei Kostrikin and Nikolai Bakhvalov. Probability, Statistics and Stochastic processes were represented by Professors (in alphabetic order) Krylov, Sevastianov, Shiriaev, Sinai, Rozanov, Ventzel ... - what a row of brilliant people! With sorrow I left the Moscow University where I have spent my best 8 years, and started working as an Associate Professor with the Mathematics department of what is now Moscow State Forest University. I enthusiastically started to bring the Moscow University spirit into the minds of students of the Electronics and Systemotechnics department (who resisted quite well, though...). In 1992 I was invited to INRIA (Sophia-Antipolis, France) to work under contract with CNET, now Research and Development Centre of France Telecom. It is in the area of modeling of large communication networks where I have found my "ecological niche" applying probabilistic approach wherever I can. If you want to get an idea of how the models of large telecommunication systems we develop look like, visit a very nice page developed by my former post-graduate student Konstantin Tchoumatchenko. 1998 - 2009 saw me already in Scotland where I was employed as a Reader at what is now the department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Strathclyde, where I did my best in teaching desperately trying to save some time for research also. Since August 2009 a new period in my life started, this time in Sweden. So, stay tuned...