Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich - biography. One of the founders of Yandex Company Russian programmer Entrepreneur. Yandex co-founder Ilya Segalovich died five years ago Yandex founder Ilya Segalovich

Ilya's parents are talented geologists, his father discovered large deposits of chromites. It was because of their work that they moved from Nizhny Novgorod to Alma-Ata. Ilya had an analytical mindset and a love for numbers since childhood, so in the Kazakh capital he was sent to a strong physical and mathematical school. Ilya took second place at the All-Union Mathematical Olympiad. Here, the future creators of the largest Russian search engine Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich met. It happened in 1977, in the 7th grade. For four years they sat together, and their desk was called the "desk of excellent students." Who would doubt that both graduated from high school with gold medals.

Immediately after school, friends went to Moscow. You will not believe it, but the future geniuses of Runet did not enter Moscow State University. However, Segalovich admitted that this happened not for objective reasons, but because of Jewish surnames. Volozh entered the Institute of Oil and Gas, Segalovich - the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute.

In 1989, Volozh created a company (originally called Arcadia), a year later Segalovich joined it. They created their first search engine for patent specialists - Directory international classification inventions. They marked about 9 volumes on several floppy disks.

Segalovich developed a program for automatic morphological analysis used in the search - then it was done on the basis of Borkovsky's dictionary. The new indexer made the program more convenient to work with. Soon the first version of the program on which Yandex worked, and the word itself appeared. It was also invented by Segalovich. The name Yandex is a symbiosis of the Cyrillic letter "I" and the word index.

Segalovich explained the success of his brainchild simply - they rebuild services and the portal so that a person does not stray in endless menus, so that everything important is on the screen where it is needed. By the way, the company has a large staff of people who simply evaluate the quality with their eyes: they take a random request and see how “beautifully” everything is served.

In an interview with New Style, Ilya Valentinovich gave the following forecast for the future: “Development is directed towards mobility, greater integration of applications and the web. We will soon have the Internet everywhere, anywhere at any time. This will provide both new ways to use fundamental services such as web search, and new services that are more tied to the mobile user. Social media will become more open, will begin to interact more strongly with the surrounding Internet.

Ilya helped his wife with her center "Children of Mary".

In an interview with Citizen K magazine, he admitted that he never aspired to wealth. He has a quite modest car, and he drives himself. He bought his first normal clothes in 2001, and before that he wore everything from parcels. humanitarian aid from friends: “Here I had the opportunity to buy a child chocolate paste, which was previously inaccessible to him, and this made me rich. I do not feel that I have become richer, although I certainly have decent clothes and fly business class. I don't need the trappings of wealth."

The wife of Ilya Segalovich, Maria Eliseeva, is a theater artist and art critic, the creator of the rehabilitation art center "Children of Mary", which Ilya actively supported. They have five children: a joint daughter Asya, three daughters of Maria from her first marriage - Alina, Olya and Anya, as well as an adopted boy Sasha. The Center works with orphans and children with special needs, helping them to develop Creative skills. For the holidays, Ilya attracted other Yandex employees, he dressed up as a clown.

Ilya once admitted that he read aloud to his children all five books about Harry Potter, moreover, in English and immediately translated (they didn’t publish books in Russian at that time, and Ilya brought English ones from abroad). He called it his second feat after Yandex.

According to Forbes magazine, as of 2011, Segalovich ranked 159th in the ranking of the richest Russian entrepreneurs.

After the death of Ilya, a special page in his memory appeared on Yandex. Here, everyone who knew him can leave their memories.

reference

Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod. Parents are geologists, so most He spent his childhood in Alma-Ata. After school, he entered the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute at the Faculty of Geophysics, from which he graduated in 1986 and worked for several years at the Institute of Mineral Resources (VIMS), where he was engaged in writing geophysical programs in the Fortran programming language. In the late 1980s, Ilya came to work in the computer firm of his longtime friend and classmate Arkady Volozh.

On July 25, 2013, Ilya Segalovich fell into a coma (before that, he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer). On July 27, at a London clinic, he was taken off life support. The funeral took place on August 1, 2013 at the Troekurovsky cemetery in Moscow. Immediately after that, CEO Arkady Volozh said on the company's blog: "Yesterday all hopes ended. Even this strong body, as it was with Ilyusha, could not stand it. Changes in the composition of the blood incompatible with life appeared. I should have let him walk away with dignity. The doctors turned it off yesterday afternoon, the heart stopped."

Director of Technology and Development at Yandex.
Active participant and organizer of assistance to orphans and sick children.

Ilya Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964 in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. In connection with the work of parents, geologists, he spent most of his childhood in Alma-Ata. After school, he entered the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute at the Faculty of Geophysics, from which he graduated in 1986 and worked for several years at the Institute of Mineral Resources, where he was engaged in writing geophysical programs in the Fortran programming language.

In the late 1980s, Ilya came to work in the computer firm of his longtime friend and classmate Arkady Volozh. Soon they jointly founded the CompTek company, created the International Classifier of Inventions and a Bible search, which took into account the morphology of the Russian language. They also developed the Yandex program for searching files on hard drives.

It was on the basis of these classifiers and the program that Volozh and Segalovich later, in the mid-1990s, developed a technology for searching for unstructured information on the Internet, taking into account the Russian language, called Yandex. This search engine has become one of the most popular among Internet users and the flagship of Runet.

Segalovich was also the director of technology and development, was a member of the board of directors of the company. This company quickly acquired financial success in the Russian IT industry. And according to Forbes magazine, as of 2011, Segalovich ranked 159th in the ranking of the richest Russian entrepreneurs. According to many experts, the programmer was a professional of the highest class, and the Russian IT industry is indebted to him for a whole generation of specialists he has brought up.

Being successful businessman, Ilya Valentinovich was also involved in charity work. In particular, he took part in the activities of the rehabilitation art center for orphans and children with developmental disabilities "Children of Mary", the founder and leader of which was his wife Maria Eliseeva.

In the fall of 2012, Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Ilya began the course of treatment, not looking up from work, and he worked full time. At first, the prognosis seemed favorable, since the body responded well to therapy, and the disease did not look neglected, but six months later, doctors also discovered a brain tumor.

Segalovich was placed in a serious condition in a London clinic, but there was no chance of recovery. For two days he was on artificial respiration, but his hopes were not justified, and changes in his body occurred that were incompatible with life.

On July 27, 2013, the founder of Yandex, Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich, was disconnected from the artificial life support apparatus. The funeral took place on August 1, 2013 at the Troekurovsky cemetery in Moscow.

On January 30, 2019, the Yandex company announced the establishment of the annual award named after Ilya Segalovich. The prize will be awarded for achievements in the fields of speech recognition and synthesis, data retrieval and analysis, in machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and machine translation.

Content

In July 2013, at the age of 48, a Russian programmer and one of the founders of the Yandex search engine and Internet portal suddenly died. What are the reasons for the death of Ilya Segalovich

Childhood

Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964 in the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). His father, Valentin Ilyich, was an outstanding geophysicist who discoveredThe Kazakh SSR has the greatest deposits of chromites, for which he even received the State Prize of the USSR.

Ilya's childhood passed in Kazakhstan, where, while studying at the Almaty Physics and Mathematics School, he met Arkady Volozh.

Career

Having unsuccessfully passed the exams at Moscow State University, Ilya Valentinovich decided to continue his father's work and submitted documents to the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute.

After some time, the young man comes to work in the Arcadia company, owned by his old friend Arkady Volozh. From this moment begins the history of "Yandex". At first, friends developed electronic directories, after processing and modernization of which a new search engine appeared, the name for which Segalovich came up with himself.

The Yandex IT company was launched back in 1996. After the launch, it was Ilya Valentinovich who was engaged in improving the search system.

What did Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich die of?

Back in 2012, an outstanding Russian programmer was diagnosed with oncology. Gastric cancer did not leave any hope for salvation, but a miracle happened: the patient's body turned out to be susceptible to chemotherapy drugs and metastases were eliminated.

A year later, cancer again made itself felt, but this time in the head, which caused the death of Ilya. In this case, the doctors were powerless: on July 25, 2013, brain death was ascertained and the patient ended up in a coma, from which there could be no safe way out. Doctors artificially supported the vital activity of the organism for several days, hoping that the first diagnosis was made incorrectly.

Ilya Segalovich died July 27, 2013 in a clinic in London. Death was officially recorded at the time of disconnecting him from life support devices.

Family

Ilya met his wife, Maria Eliseeva, before the launch of Yandex in 1993. This woman has become a real muse for him. Together with her, Segalovich began his charitable activities from visiting the Moscow boarding school No. 103 and the theater studio at this institution.

It was Ilya who gave the name charitable organization his wife “Children of Mary”, in whose activities he also took an active part. Her foundation supported orphanages in Beslan and Vladikavkaz. During his activities in the charitable field, this man became foster father for several boarding school students and a true friend for many other children deprived of parental care. Four children were brought up in his family, and children from the boarding school often visited the house.

In addition to cooperation with the organization "Children of Mary", Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich was a member of the Council of another foundation - "Dynasty", which dealt with the popularization of science in Russia (until 2015). It is this person who is the founder of the information and reference system “National Corpus of the Russian Language”. Love for the Motherland and for life was combined in his activities with a rare perfectionism that made him invest in every direction with maximum return and endlessly improve the world around and yourself.

When Ilya Segalovich died , all the people who knew him personally or by the nature of his activities were in deep shock. This gifted and in every way outstanding person burned out from cancer literally before our eyes. After the diagnosis was made, the outcome was obvious, but relatives and friends hoped for a miracle to the end.

The story of how Ilya Segalovich lived and died is a worthy example for future generations. A man who did not need anything, tried to make the world a better place, every day doing everything possible to help others. It is difficult to overestimate his contribution to the future of his native country - children and to its science.

Ilya Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod in a family of geologists, but spent most of his childhood in Alma-Ata. There, as a schoolboy, he met Arkady Volozh, the current general director.

After school, he entered the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute at the Faculty of Geophysics. In 1991, he accepted Volozh's invitation and got a job at the company former classmate, which was engaged in the development of search programs. Two years later, Yandex was born - this is how Ilya Segalovich called the next text search engine.

In May 2011, Yandex held an IPO. According to Forbes, at that time Segalovich's fortune was estimated at $600 million.

In addition to Yandex, Ilya Segalovich was engaged in social activities, participated in the movement against electoral fraud, attended rallies on Sakharov Avenue and Bolotnaya Square.

Ilya Segalovich married Maria Eliseeva, an artist and art critic. In the mid-90s, Maria organized a charity art studio "Maria's Children", which supported orphans, as well as boarding school graduates. Ilya undertook to help his wife and often dressed up as a clown to make the visitors of the studio laugh.

“I don’t know what can replace his encyclopedic technology and clear vision of the product. But he left behind a whole new generation of programmers, a whole school. And his ethical standards set the level for all of us, ”Arkady Volozh wrote on the day of Segalovich’s death.

In one of the entrances of the central office of "Yandex" there is a sculptural composition "Copy paste: mismatches are random. Six portraits of Ilya Segalovich. The sculptures were created in 2016-2017, when it was planned to come up with some kind of monument to Ilya - informal, about work and atmosphere.

As a result, the monument was not made, and in the process of working on it, one of the authors, the famous Moscow sculptor Elena Munts, made several portraits from fireclay.

They were so similar that it was decided to put these portraits in the office. As Elena herself said, after watching kilometers of video and gigabytes of photos: “I was so fascinated by Ilya that my hands fashioned his portrait from clay.”

My goal has always been to be totally uncool
but one who actually understands inside that he is just the coolest of all.
Ilya Segalovich.

And lya Valentinovich Segalovich is one of the most famous Russian programmers who made a significant personal contribution to the development of the Russian-language Internet. Segalovich stood at the Yandex search engine, for many years served as director of technology and development in this company, actively participated in social activities organization of assistance to disabled children and orphans.

And Lya Segalovich was born in Nizhny Novgorod (at that time the city of Gorky) on September 13, 1964. Ilya's father was eminent Soviet geophysicist Valentin Ilyich Segalovich, famous for the discovery of the largest chromite deposits in the Soviet Union - Voskhod and 40 years of the Kazakh SSR. For these merits, Valentin Ilyich was awarded several prestigious government awards and even presented to State Prize Soviet Union.

Childhood.

Ilya Segalovich spent his childhood and early youth in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Here, in the Kazakhstan branch All-Union Institute exploration geophysics (KazVIRG), his parents worked. My father was engaged in research in a scientific laboratory. Mother worked in the computer center of the institute on the first Soviet computers - "Minsk-22" and "Minsk-32". The Segalovich family lived in a small scientific town at the institute. Ilya recalled that he had to travel to a school located in the city by a special bus organized by the trade union of KazVIRG.

In the first class of this Alma-Ata high school No. 54, which was considered one of best schools in the city, Ilya was enrolled in 1971. From the first years of study, he showed a remarkable ability in mathematics. To the best way to realize his talent, in 1977, at the end of the sixth grade, Ilya, following the advice of his father, enters the Republican Physics and Mathematics School. Here Ilya strikes up a friendship with his desk neighbor Arkady Volozh. This friendship will last the whole life of Ilya Segalovich and will become a reliable basis for their future business cooperation with Volozh.

According to the memoirs of Ilya himself, studying at the physics and mathematics school was easy for him. All four years of study, he received excellent marks in all subjects, from mathematics to literature. In 1981, he took an honorable second place at the All-Union Mathematical Olympiad and graduated from the RFMS with a gold medalist.

Moscow.

In the same year, Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh come to Moscow to try to enter the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow state university. The attempt turns out to be unsuccessful, but the friends did not want to wait for the next opportunity to enter Moscow State University, since the army was waiting for the failed students, and the USSR in 1981 already participated in afghan war. Therefore, Ilya enters the same geophysical faculty of the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, which his father once graduated from, and Volozh goes to the faculty applied mathematics Moscow Institute of Petrochemical and Gas Industry. I. M. Gubkin.

In 1986, Ilya Segalovich graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Art with honors. Soon he marries and gets a job as a senior laboratory assistant (and later a researcher) at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Mineral Resources. N. M. Fedorovsky. Working at VNIIMS under the guidance of I.D. Savinsky, Segalovich is engaged in the development of geophysical software systems in Fortran and C ++, publishes several scientific articles in "Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences".

Reunion with Volozh.

In 1990, in Segalovich, he got a job as a programmer in the Arcadia company, created by his friend Arkady Volozh together with the linguist Arkady Borkovsky. Somewhat later, Arcadia will become part of the structure of another Volozh company - CompTek. The main activity of "Arcadia" at that time was the work on the creation of a full-text search, taking into account the morphology of the Russian language. Initially, Segalovich is involved in testing and building software distributions, but very soon becomes one of the main developers, focusing on optimizing search procedures.

The new morphological analysis program created by Ilya Segalovich made it possible to increase the search speed from three words up to one thousand words per second. In addition, an efficient and fast indexer has been included in the search. Thanks to new developments in September 1993, the first version was created new program, called "Yandex" (an abbreviation invented by Segalovich from English yet another indexer).

Looking for Opportunities practical application results of their work Segalovich and Volozh in 1994 released the Bible Computer Reference - an electronic version of the synodal translation of the Bible with the ability to search the text of words in various grammatical forms. The Digital Bible did not bring financial profit to friends, but CompTech was noticed in the market. Soon CompTech receives an offer from the Institute of World Literature to prepare electronic versions complete collection works of Pushkin and Griboyedov. This order brought the company the money needed to expand the staff of programmers.

Yandex.

In parallel with the work on digital versions of the works of the classics of Russian literature, Segalovich and colleagues are reworking the search engine in such a way as to make it possible to use it. In the fall of 1996, CompTech introduced a software product under the Yandex brand to the market, and already in 1997, the company indexed the Runet and launched the yandex.ru website.

"I am index" was not the first. By the time it appeared on the market, AltaVista also held leading positions in search in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. To successfully compete with these search engines, Ilya Segalovich, along with other programmers of the company, had to constantly work to modernize the search engine and introduce new search technologies. It was during this period that a banner began to be placed on the pages of search results, thanks to which the Internet portal began to bring profit to its creators.

In 2000, Arkady Volozh made a difficult decision to leave CompTech, which was successful at that time, and concentrate on a promising and rapidly developing Internet industry. After a long search for investors, Yandex is created. Volozh holds a post in it CEO, and Ilya Segalovich becomes the head of the search engine department, determining global strategy development of search technology.

The emphasis on the development of an Internet portal and a search engine has justified itself. In 2001, the attendance of "Yandex" for the first time exceeds that of Rambler. Since 2002, the company begins to bring a stable, rapidly growing profit every year. In subsequent years, Yandex, with the direct participation of Ilya, turns into one of the largest Russian Internet portals and takes fourth place in terms of the number of processed requests in the world ranking of search engines.

In May 2011, Yandex held an initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ exchange, earning $ 1.3 billion - the best result in world history for an Internet company, with the exception of 2004.

Since 2003, Ilya Segalovich has been the director of technology in the company and heads the development department. In the ranking of the Russian-speaking Forbes versions « The richest businessmen Russia 2011” Ilya Segalovich took 159th place. He owned a 4.15% stake in Yandex LLC, and his fortune was estimated at $600 million.

Ilya Segalovich's professional activities were not limited to his work at Yandex; a number of other interesting projects were launched with his direct participation. So, for example, through his efforts, the “National Corpus of the Russian Language” was created - a collection of Russian texts with the ability to search for various word forms in it, intended for scientific research in the field of vocabulary and grammar of the language. Ilya also co-founded the annual Russian Workshop on Methods Assessment information retrieval, served on the board of the private non-profit Dynasty Foundation, which supports Russian science, and actively engaged in charitable activities.

Family.

In 1993, thinking about emigration, Ilya Segalovich enrolled in courses in English. There he meets his second wife, artist and teacher Maria Eliseeva. Together they often visit boarding school No. 103, arranging excursions for its pupils to the art studio of Maria Eliseeva at children's theater"Basement". The connection between the Segalovichs and the children from the boarding school gradually strengthened so much that after the birth of a common child (Maria herself already had three of them), the couple took four more girls under guardianship. So Ilya Segalovich becomes the head of a truly large family.

In 1997, Ilya Segalovich, together with his wife Maria Eliseeva, opened a children's rehabilitation center, which he named after his wife "Maria's Children". The main activity of the center is the psychosocial adaptation of orphans and children with developmental disabilities through a variety of activities. creative activity: drawing, modeling, ceramics, embroidery.

On the initiative of the Segalovich family, since 2005, an annual nationwide campaign has been held to collect diapers for orphanages. An unusual, slightly provocative name for this action - "Dry Butt" - came up with Maria Eliseeva.

And Lya Segalovich more than once organized the visit to Russia of Patch Adams, a well-known American doctor and public figure, who, along with his team of clowns, gives free performances for seriously ill children around the world. Ilya did not shy away from participating in these performances, trying on a clown outfit to please the children.

In 2005, the activities of Ilya Segalovich were awarded the national public award in the field of volunteerism. Segalovich five times entered the "Magnificent Twenty Runet" - a competition in which twenty network figures are awarded who have made an invaluable contribution to the development of the Russian segment of the Network. In 2011, Ilya Segalovich took second place in this honorary twenty.

And Lya Segalovich, without any doubt, was a person with an active civic position. Without getting involved in political games, he had a clear opinion on many important issues for society: he expressed his views on the reorganization of the capital's transport network, described possible ways building an election system that is maximally protected from fraud and took part in the development of the Web Observer project, attended opposition rallies in support of political prisoners, and ardently protested against the adoption of a law banning the adoption of orphans from Russian orphanages by American families.

Care.

In 2012, Ilya Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer. For six months, doctors fought for Ilya's life. Segalovich himself before last days did not stop working on new Yandex projects. Unfortunately, the disease metastasized to the brain. At the end of July 2013, Ilya Segalovich was put into an artificial coma in a London hospital. On July 27, 2013, he was taken off life support.

Ilya Segalovich was buried in the city of Moscow at the Troekurovsky cemetery.

Shortly after the death of Ilya Segalovich, Yandex opened a special page in his memory - iseg.yandex.ru, which contains the memories of friends, colleagues and just acquaintances of this wonderful person, posted photos of Ilya and videos from his interview. Anyone who has something to remember about Ilya Segalovich can send their memories to the email address indicated on the page.

And that's all about Ilya Segalovich.