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...Je connais des gens de toutes sortes

Ils n'égalent pas leurs destins

Indécis comme feuilles mortes

Leurs yeux sont des feux mal éteints

Leurs coeurs bougent comme leurs portes

         (Apollinaire, Marizibill).

I am a Siberian-born mathematician and a dual citizen of New Zealand and Canada, two countries where the main part of my academic life has passed. After taking early retirement from the University of Ottawa, ON (where I am now Emeritus Professor), I became a mathematical freelancer in Brazil.  I have spent a few years on the off-shore island of Santa Catarina, a year in Salvador, Bahia, over a year in João Pessoa, Paraíba, and a year and a half on road trips across Brazil in a small but resilient Fiesta. Since October 2024, I am a 'Senior Visiting Professor' at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, in principle up to 4 years, but we will see.

My most interesting results are in the dynamical theory of infinite dimensional groups, and many of them appear in this AMS book; in particular, I have contributed the letter P to what is now known as the K-P-T correspondence. Among my other interests are mathematical topics related to datasets. Here are my publications on  Google Scholar, Zentralblatt für Math, and DBLP computer science database, as well as my Math Genealogy.

Some memorable works were already done in Brazil: skew-amenability of finite energy loop groups and a universally consistent learning rule with a universally monotone error. Or the surprising uniformly equivalent metric on the real line under which the k-NN classifier fails.

Since getting a Ph.D. from Moscow University 42 years ago, I was mostly making my living by teaching - on four different continents, in four different countries, in four different languages.... did I pay my dues, or not quite yet?