Igor Rivin is the founder of Rivin Financial.
Igor was born in Moscow, USSR (now Russia), where, before his family left for Canada, he studied at the celebrated special school no. 2. While in Canada, he finished the five years of high school in one year, at the end of which year he won First Prize at the Canadian Mathematics Olympiad. He attended University of Toronto, where he had the opportunity to study Geometry with H. S. M. Coxeter, before going to Princeton, where he was originally intending to study Complex Analysis, but wound up studying geometry with the Fields Medalist William Thurston, while at the same time studying algebraic geometry at Harvard, and spending his spare time at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, primarily working on the pioneering Macsyma computer mathematics system. Igor's PhD dissertation is now viewed as a foundational work in Hyperbolic Geometry. After leaving Princeton, Igor spent a year at Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris, and went to the Stanford Computer Science Department to work with John McCarthy (one of the fathers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, the creator of the LISP family of programming languages, and a Turing Award Winner) on parallel computer algebra. After two years at Stanford, Igor joined Wolfram Research Inc to work on Mathematica\copyright. Igor rapidly became the head of the development effort at Wolfram Research, together with Stephen Wolfram, but at the end of two years he decided to return to research. After two years of consulting at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton (on such diverse fields as machine learning, VLSI design (where he gained a patent) and Physical Chemistry, in addition to geometry), he returned to academia with a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, followed in short order by a Warwick Research Fellowship in England, followed by a National Science and Engineering Research Council (UK) Advanced Fellowship, and then a Professorship at Temple University, where he has been since (visiting at Princeton University, University of Chicago, Stanford University, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Henri Poincar\e and Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Institute for Advanced Study, and the Berlin Mathematical School in the meantime). Igor has solved a number of open problems in Mathemaatics (including one dating back to 1832 and considered intractable), and published in some of the most prestigious journals. Igor's academic honors include:
- A number of National Science Foundation research grants (one in Materials Science, one in supercomputing)
- Berlin Mathematical Society Distinguished Professorship, held at Technische Universitat Berlin and Freie Universitat Berlin in the fall term of 2011.
- Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study (for 2010-2011 academic year, and previously, for the 1993-1994 academic year)
- Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Temple University Mathematics Department Distinguished Scholar Award for 2005-2006
- Advanced Fellowship of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK
- Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society
- National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postgraduate Fellowship (held at Princeton University.
- Princeton University Graduate Fellowship
- First Prize at the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad
Igor has been involved in Finance since 2004. He consulted with Morgan Stanley's Equity Trading Laboratory and the Susquehanna International Group's Statistical Arbitrage Group before starting Meteque Holdings, LLC, which manage Samsara Investment Partners, LP, and Neve Shaanan, LP funds.
Igor runs two blogs on finance: Igor's Finance Thoughts, and the Samsara Investment Partners Blog. He also runs the Temple University Geometry Blog. He is also active on twitter. Some of Igor's Mathematics presentations can be found on Slideshare.
Igor's father was the noted inventor Evgeny Rivin.