Ilya Chevyrev

On a non-descript day in mid-October sat Ilya Chevyrev in the now all-too common zoom meeting; talking to me about his life story, which is really just a story about how much he loves maths.

Ilya was born in Russia but, due to political tensions in the mid-1990s, his family decided to move to New Zealand when he was just six years old. Despite not speaking any English, Ilya soon got used to school in New Zealand and enjoyed it, especially maths. Maths puzzles set at school intrigued him and made him curious about the subject. His father (who had a background in physics but was working as a computer programmer) also set Ilya and his sisters puzzles and explained parts of his work to them. This influenced his decision to study mathematics at the University of Auckland. Here he found, as most students do, that there is a substantial change from the rigid timetables and being with people you know all the time to suddenly being able to choose when to study and having to make time to see friends. The University of Auckland is similar to Edinburgh in the fact that you are able to take outside courses. Ilya remembers enjoying a course on Antarctica as it let him appreciate some aspects of biology. However, despite these brief forays into the other sciences, his love of maths remained and he focused on algebraic number theory as his degree ended. This is a field which uses abstract algebra to study the integers, rational numbers, and their generalizations. It is partly due to algebraic number theory that Fermat’s Last Theorem was able to be proved and the field can also boast contributions from Gauss, Dirichlet, and Hilbert (amongst others).

After Ilya finished his bachelor’s degree he moved half-way across the world and changed his field of study to take up a masters in probability theory at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris. It was a subject he had enjoyed in his undergraduate days because of the fact that it has both pure maths elements (such as theorems like the Law of large numbers or the Central limit theorem) and also applied maths elements. Yet, one major problem was that his course was entirely in French, a language he did not know. However, due to maths being such a universal language he was able to understand his course by just learning a few words, such as ‘therefore’ and ‘thus’. Following his masters, he moved country again; this time to complete a PhD in Oxford on Rough Path theory. Rough Path theory is a sub-topic of stochastic analysis which was developed in the mid-1990s and is to do with constructing robust solutions for a type of differential equation.

Today Ilya is a reader at Edinburgh University using probability and analysis to study physical models. One example he gives is using differential equations to look at the growth of a crystal and, from there, try to predict its future growth or the probability it will be a certain size. He explains that a lot of research is actually just trying to ask the right questions. This can be quite a foreign concept to students as we spend most of our time trying to find the right answers. However, somebody has been asking the right questions in Ilya’s field. In the last eight- or nine-years important steps have been made to give a strong mathematical foundation to the process of renormalisation. This is a key part of quantum field theory as it means that researchers won’t get answers which contain zero or infinity, which are not the most useful.

Outside of maths Ilya enjoys spending time with his son who has just turned two years old. His son takes up most of his spare time but before he was born, he used to play tennis as well as guitar and piano and looks forward to getting back into those at some point.

Ilya’s life is really just a demonstration of his love of maths. He crossed several continents and lived in many countries just so he could learn more about the maths that interests and excites him. It is perhaps fitting then that his main advice to students is to read around the parts of maths that interest them. He suggests googling terms that you don’t know or looking into the background of a subject; you might be surprised at the amazing maths that can be found.