Nikolai Durov


Nikolai Valeryevich Durov is a Russian programmer and mathematician. He is the elder brother of Pavel Durov, together with whom he founded the social networking site VK and later Telegram.

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. In 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 he won one gold and three silver medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics. He was a member of Saint-Petersburg State University ACM team, which won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2000 and 2001.
He received his first PhD from Saint Petersburg State University in 2005. He continued his mathematical education at the University of Bonn and in 2007 obtained another PhD under supervision of Gerd Faltings entitled "A new approach to Arakelov geometry".

Career

Research

Durov introduced commutative algebraic monads as a generalization of local objects in a generalized algebraic geometry. 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.

Other work

Durov worked as a lead developer of the VK team until 2013.
Together with his brother Pavel, he founded the instant messenger service Telegram and developed the MTProto protocol for Telegram in 2013.
Durov is believed to be the author of the original TON whitepaper.