About Vladimir Voevodsky
Vladimir Alexandrovich Voevodsky (, Russian: Влади́мир Алекса́ндрович Воево́дский; 4 June 1966 – 30 September 2017) was a Russian-American mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002. He is also known for the proof of the Milnor conjecture and motivic Bloch–Kato conjectures and for the univalent foundations of mathematics and homotopy type theory. == Early life and education == Vladimir Voevodsky's father, Aleksander Voevodsky, was head of the Laboratory of High Energy Leptons in the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His mother Tatyana was a chemist. Voevodsky attended Moscow State University for a while, but was expelled without a diploma for refusing to attend classes and failing academically. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1992 after being recommended without even applying and without a formal college degree, following several independent publications; he was advised there by David Kazhdan. While he was a first year undergraduate, he was given a copy of "Esquisse d'un Programme" (submitted a few months earlier by Alexander Grothendieck to CNRS) by his advisor George Shabat. He learned the French language "with the sole purpose of being able to read this text" and started his research on some of the themes mentioned there. == Work == Voevodsky's work was in the intersection of algebraic geometry with algebraic topology.
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