Artist Maria Eliseeva: about how to learn to help others, and about five years without Ilya Segalovich. Icon of the era: Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex Ilya Segalovich relatives

Many specialists for a long time were engaged in the development of the Russian-language sector of the Internet, but Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich made a special contribution to this matter. It was he and his friend who founded the search company Yandex. This event was preceded by a thorough study of existing information selection algorithms and their subsequent modernization.

Ilya Segalovich: biography

The famous programmer was born in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, and it happened on September 13, 1964.

In 1981, he began his studies at the Moscow Geological Exploration Institute at the Faculty of Geophysics.

Four years after graduation, Ilya began working at the Arcadia company. In it he held the position of group leader software. It is worth mentioning that the company itself specialized in developing applications for carrying out full-fledged morphological search of text information.

In the 90s, Ilya, together with his classmate and friend Arkady Volzh, began creating technology for searching unstructured data. It was decided to call this technique “Yandex”. A couple of years later, the same guys founded a company of the same name.

Until 2000, Ilya Segalovich worked as head of the search systems department at CompTek International.

In 1997, Ilya and his wife founded the rehabilitation art center “Children of Mary”. The purpose of his organization was to provide social assistance to disabled children and orphans.

The year 2003 was marked for the programmer by his transition to the position of technical director of Yandex.

In 2011, the co-founder of the search company accepted Active participation in the social movement against falsification of the results of the electoral process.

On July 25, 2013, the first news of the death of Ilya Segalovich appeared on the Internet. A few hours later, the media reported that the man was in a coma, and the activity of his body was supported by an artificial life support system.

On July 27, the public figure was finally disconnected from the device and the fact of death was recorded.

Charity

The founder of Yandex, Ilya Segalovich, was married to artist Maria Eliseeva, who founded a tradition in their family of helping children in need. It all started when a woman invited a group of people to perform in one of the capital’s boarding schools: activist, clown Patch Adams and a doctor from America. Then her friends and beloved husband began to help her organize such meetings.

Already in 1993, an art studio was opened for children with disabilities and orphans, which in the future turned into a famous rehabilitation center.

Ilya Segalovich not only replaced his wife as a leader charitable organization"Children of Mary", but also actively took part in performances.

At first he organized children's parties in orphanages, then he purposefully worked for the benefit of orphans from his wife's art studio.

Ilya Segalovich is not only a leading programmer, but also a volunteer of the Yandex company. Since 2006, the company's employees have made visits to orphanages and shelters traditional. They visited not only children in the capital, but also traveled to different Russian cities.

Working rules from a professional

Ilya Segalovich believed that nothing should be done without a feeling of haste, otherwise you simply cannot reach the finish line first. And you’re unlikely to be second if you don’t have the feeling within you that the work needs to be done right here and now.

He was never afraid to hire people smarter than himself. The programmer did not consider himself a great genius, and this allowed him not to relax.

A person may be smart, but this does not mean that he will never make mistakes. Even a universally recognized genius can do stupid things. It is only important to realize the mistake in time and admit it.

Ilya Segalovich: cause of death

On July 25, 2013, Ilya Segalovich was recorded. He was immediately connected to a life support machine.

Later it turned out that the co-founder of Yandex fell into a coma. After that he lived for almost three days.

Back in the fall of 2012, Segalovich was diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer with metastases. The chemotherapy course he completed helped Ilya continue to lead active work. They found a good doctor for him, who was able to choose the right medications, and the programmer’s body turned out to be very susceptible to chemistry. Ilya Segalovich literally came to life.

But it turned out that the cancer had spread to the membrane of the brain. And literally in a couple of days he simply “burned out.”

This is how the founder of Yandex passed away.

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 mind and a love of numbers since childhood, so in the Kazakh capital he was sent to a strong physics and mathematics school. Ilya took second place at the All-Union Mathematics Olympiad. This is where the future creators of the largest Russian search engine Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich met. This happened in 1977, in 7th grade. For four years they sat together, and their desk was called the “excellent students’ desk.” Who would doubt that both graduated from school with gold medals.

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

In 1989, Volozh created a company (originally called Arcadia), and a year later Segalovich joined it. They created their first search engine for patent specialists - the Directory of the International Classification of Inventions. They labeled about 9 volumes on several floppy disks.

Segalovich developed a program for automatic morphological analysis used in searches - 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 are building services and a portal so that a person does not get lost in endless menus, so that everything important is on the screen where it is needed. By the way, the company has large staff people who simply evaluate quality with their eyes: they take a random request and see how “beautifully” everything is presented.

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 closely tied to the mobile user. Social media They will become more open and begin to interact more strongly with the surrounding Internet.”

Ilya helped his wife with her Children of Mary center.

In an interview with Citizen K magazine, he admitted that he never aspired to wealth. He has a very modest car, and he drives it himself. He bought his first normal clothes in 2001, and before that he wore everything from parcels humanitarian aid from friends: “I had the opportunity to buy my child chocolate spread, which was previously unavailable to him, and this made me rich. I don't feel like I'm any richer, although I certainly have decent clothes and fly business class. I don’t need the attributes of wealth.”

Ilya Segalovich's wife Maria Eliseeva is a theater artist and art critic, creator of a 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 develop Creative skills. During the holidays, Ilya attracted other Yandex employees and dressed up as a clown.

Ilya once admitted that he read all five books about Harry Potter aloud to his children, in English and immediately translated them (the books were not yet published in Russian at that time, and Ilya brought English ones from abroad). He called this his second feat after Yandex.

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

After Ilya’s death, 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. His parents are geologists, so he spent most of his childhood in Almaty. After school, he entered the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, Faculty of Geophysics, from which he graduated in 1986 and worked at the Institute for several years mineral raw materials(VIMS), where he was engaged in writing geophysical programs in the Fortran programming language. In the late 1980s, Ilya came to work at the computer company of his longtime friend and classmate Arkady Volozh.

On July 25, 2013, Ilya Segalovich fell into a coma (before that he was diagnosed with stomach cancer). On July 27, in a London clinic, he was disconnected from artificial life support. The funeral took place on August 1, 2013 at the Troekurovskoye cemetery in Moscow. Immediately after this, in the company’s blog, General Director Arkady Volozh said: “Yesterday all hopes ended. Even such a strong body as Ilyusha’s could not stand it. Changes in the composition of the blood appeared that were incompatible with life. We had to let him pass away with dignity. The doctors turned him off Yesterday afternoon, my heart stopped."

Ilya Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod into 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, Faculty of Geophysics. In 1991, he accepted Volozh’s invitation and got a job at a former classmate’s company, which was developing search programs. Two years later, “Yandex” was born - that’s what Ilya Segalovich called the next text search engine.

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

In addition to Yandex, Ilya Segalovich was involved in social activities, participated in the movement against election 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 charitable art studio, “Mary's Children,” which supported orphans and boarding school graduates. Ilya began to help his wife and often dressed up as a clown to make studio visitors laugh.

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

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

In the end, they did not make the monument, 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 photographs: “I was so fascinated by Ilya that my hands themselves sculpted his portrait from clay.”

Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich - Russian programmer And public figure, co-founder and technical director of Yandex LLC.

Assets

Ilya Segalovich's main assets are concentrated:

• Internet, computer technologies (Yandex LLC). Owned a 4.15% stake in Yandex LLC.

State

Biography

Grandmother is from a family of hereditary priests. Parents are geologists; they spent their childhood in Kazakhstan. In the 60s, my father discovered “40 years of the KazSSR” and “Voskhod” - the largest chromite deposits in the CIS, for which he received various government awards and was included in various encyclopedias.

1977-1981 - Republican Physics and Mathematics School (RFMS, Alma-Ata, USSR).

He studied in the city of Alma-Ata, first at school No. 54. Starting from the seventh grade, for 4 years in a row I sat at the same desk with my friend Arkady Volozh in the Republican Phys.-Mathematics. School of the city of Almaty. Which desk gave out half of the gold medals of the above-mentioned school in 1981. At the same time, he managed to successfully shoot at the All-Union Mathematics Olympiad, where he took second place (see the archives of the Kvant magazine for 1981)

Ilya Segalovich: about his years of study at the Almaty School of Physics and Mathematics, his deskmate - Arkady Volozha - and their joint attempt to enter the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University

Not getting into the university where Arkady and I entered together, we scattered. He followed in the footsteps of his father, to Kerosinka (his father is a famous oil geologist, who also discovered a lot of things, and an old friend of my father, where, in fact, we met), and I followed in my footsteps, to MGRI at the Faculty of Geophysics. Times were hard, Afghan stood in the yard and new law on the conscription of students starting in 1982. There was no choice.

1981-1986 - Moscow Geological Exploration Institute named after. S. Ordzhonikidze (MGRI, Moscow, USSR (Moscow State Geological Prospecting University)), Faculty of Geophysics.

After graduating and getting married for the first time, I ended up at VIMS (Institute of Mineral Resources), where I successfully wrote geophysical systems in Fortran and even published a little (Izvestia AN, the Physics of the Earth series, for example).

Career

1990 – Head of the software group at Arcadia. Was involved in the development of a program for full-text morphological text search.

1993 - writes morforazbor, which contains 100 thousand Russian words in 300 kilobytes random access memory and runs at 1000 words per second on multiple computers.

1993-2000 – Head of Search Systems Division at CompTek International.

1995-2000 – Head of the development group, leading programmer at Komtek CJSC.

“Since 1990, there was a strong feeling that we needed to do something else. Fortunately, we didn’t have to search for long; by that time, Arkady had already founded a company, specifically for Borkovsky, who by that time already had a spell checker, dictionary Gene , and a bunch of other things.

Arkady's hopes were not justified, Borkovsky left for America, but the guys who stayed (one of them is now a programmer in Boston, and the other Cisco Russia) made an excellent program with full-text morphological search. For 1990, this was probably a record. I started working part-time for them, making distributions, testing, and even wrote an installer (more precisely, I rewrote Volozh’s texts) and a demo video. Gradually he became insolent and began to optimize everything, moving into the ranks of the main developers. In 1991, one could live on the sale of this product, feed 5-10 people, and even in the spring of 1992, go to Apresyan and Boguslavsky and get a high-quality dictionary from them.

Then the money ran out, and making my own morphology turned out to be a very difficult task. The first version on the new dictionary (not a single line from Borkovsky) worked at a speed of 3 words per second. And only, looking at the books, in the spring of 1993 I wrote a morphological analysis that held 100 thousand Russian words in 300 kilobytes of main memory and worked at a speed of 1000 words per second on those computers.

Finally, the opportunity has arisen to make a fast indexer, which is called “for the end user.” And in the fall of the same year, the first Yandex program appeared. All that year I was, in fact, the only programmer in the office that sold computers, because the programs somehow weren’t selling very well. (local search, in general, was of little interest to anyone back then).

But instead of making search engines that are not clear to anyone, they decided to follow the beaten path and release a “closed” system with morphosearch. This is how the “Bible” came into being. More precisely, the Bible Computer Reference Book. Program for Windows. We already made it together; Arkady hired an interface programmer to help me. In 1994 we were slowly selling it and finishing it, and in 1995 people from InformRegister saw it and came to us from their previous technology suppliers (Parhomenko). This is how we received a large order for Griboyedov.

While they were making it, they hired more programmers, CompTek moved to an office with the Internet, and everyone realized that they urgently needed to do a search for the Internet. It was the end of 1995 - beginning of 1996.

In the spring of 1996, morphology in the “closed” dictionary ceased to suit everyone. For one simple reason: in the Bible, 40 percent of the words are non-dictionary, and on the Internet even more (if measured by the dictionary).

After listening to several caustic reproaches (they say, how many years have you been doing this, but have not done anything good for people), I became terribly angry with myself and in a fairly short time created an “open” dictionary, approximately what is now working in Yandex.”

2000 – Head of the Development Department, Director of Technology and Development at Yandex LLC.

Ilya Segalovich came up with the word “Yandex” itself (consisting of the characteristic Cyrillic letter “Ya” and part of the word index; the fact that Russian pronoun"I" corresponds to the English "I") and developed an automatic morphological analysis program used in searches.

Forecast of Yandex co-owner Ilya Segalovich

Ilya Segalovich: about trends and competitors, about investments, about partnership, team and partnership in a team, about life after IPO and a little about personal

* 2013: Death from cancer

On July 25, 2013, Ilya Segalovich died at the age of 48. Segalovich's death was due to unexpected complications of stomach cancer, which until that moment had responded well to treatment. CEO company Arkady Volozh published an entry on the corporate blog:

“Ilyusha and I have been friends since school; we sat at the same desk for four years. And then together we created Yandex. He passed away tonight. Everything happened too quickly and unexpectedly.

Last time he spoke to our Istanbul guys last Thursday. He came out and said: “Hello, my name is Ilya.” Everyone laughed, and he talked about the “Islands” search platform.

I don’t know what can replace his encyclopedicism in technology and pure vision of the product. But he left behind him a whole new generation of programmers, an entire school. And his ethical standards set the standard for all of us.”

On the same day, it turned out that Segalovich was connected to artificial life support in a London clinic.

On the afternoon of July 27, Ilya Segalovich died. As Yandex CEO and co-founder Arkady Volozh explained in the company's official blog, on July 25 at 1:30 Moscow time, Segalovich was diagnosed with brain death.

"Brain death and lack of breathing is the modern technical definition of death. Today's medical technology make it possible to keep the body on artificial respiration for several more days. But this is an irreversible condition,” Volozh explained.

The diagnosis of “terminal gastric cancer with metastases,” according to Volozh, was made to Segalovich in September last year.

"On last week a tumor was discovered in the head. On Tuesday-Wednesday the cancer spread to the membranes of the brain. Malignant meningitis led to irreversible consequences - his brain “burnt out” in less than 24 hours,” Volozh wrote on the company’s blog.

Projects and developments

Initiator of the creation of a collection of Russian texts in electronic form, adapted for research and search “National Corpus of the Russian Language”.

Co-founder of the project “Russian seminar on assessing information retrieval methods”.

Author and head of development of desktop search products ( International classification inventions, integrated classifier, biblical computer reference book, electronic scientific publications “Griboyedov”, “Pushkin”, “Standards”).

Participation in competitions:

• Magnificent twenty of Runet 2011: 2nd place.
• Magnificent twenty of Runet 2009: 13th place.
• Magnificent twenty of Runet 2008: 15th place.
• Magnificent twenty of Runet 2007: 20th place.
• Magnificent twenty of Runet 2006: 12th place.

Publications

Charity

1997 - co-founder and deputy chairman of the board of the Children of Mary Rehabilitation Art Center ( social assistance orphans and disabled children).

Ilya Segalovich “How can Maria’s children find their way to Seliger and how will millions of Yandex users help with this”

Initiator of the charity program “National Action “Dry Butt” (collecting diapers for orphanages).

He organizes the arrival of the international clown team Patch Adams to Russia to entertain sick children, and he himself often performs as part of this team.

Awards

2005 - National Community Award for Volunteering.

Family status

Married, eight children. Took into custody four children from orphanages.

"From personal details - around 1993, I decided to study English (having strategic plans to go far away), and there, on courses, I met my future wife. We started going with her to Boarding School No. 103 and regularly taking the children to her studio at the Podval children's theater. Gradually, our involvement in their affairs, and theirs in ours, increased, and about a year after Masha and I had our own child (she already had three before that), we took first one, and then two more girls into our family. So I’m also the dad of the big Foster family.”

• Wife - Maria Eliseeva.
• Daughter - Olga Eliseeva.
• Daughter - Alina Eliseeva.
• Daughter - Anna Eliseeva.
• Daughter - Anastasia Segalovich.
• Daughter - Zhanna Novikova.
• Daughter - Inna Agaltsova.
• Daughter - Nadezhda Varaksina.
• Son - Alexander Korostelin.

Notes

1. The richest businessmen Russia - 2011
2. Ilya Segalovich: one of the founders of Yandex