Life is ...

I was born in St. Petersburg, big city with kindest people, but before I knew it our family moved to a small and beautiful sea-town of Klaipeda, on a Lithuanian coast of Baltic sea, which I regard as mein kleines Vaterland.
My bigger homeland, CCCP, disappeared in an explosion of chaos right before my eyes. I have been studing physics in Moscow at the time. I look back at those six years with fascination and a feeling of lost opportunity. Back in the old country it was an "interesting" phase of initial acquisition of capital. I acquired none, but during those turmoil years, I have seen two "Coup de ta"s, 1991 and 1992, tanks shooting at the parlament building, mafia, crooked cops, my classmates getting rich overnight and back to poor next morning. My alma mater is Fiztech, a great educational establishment, scientific jewel of the old country. There I not only received one of the best educations in math and physics, but also a quite unique upbringing. I shared space with some brilliant fellows; some of them I got to keep as friends.
Some major portion of my life have been doing scientific research at Columbia University on experiment called Nutev/E815. It was one of my finest adventures. I was part of a privilage society greedy for knowledge with nature as our playground. Just like it was promised in sci-fi literature by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and many others. Except they forgot to mention battles for grands and ugly internal politics.
I concluded my research with Columbia Ph.D. (check out my research here) to continue with programming for Bloomberg and now in a quant trading group at Morgan Stanley.
And here I am, in NYC, the belly button of the world, the New Babylon, thousands languages and stroken down towers. Paraphrasing an ancient chinese curse, I could not have found a more interesting time to live...
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