The previous issue of the ICMI Bulletin presented biographical information on all the members, but one, of the new Executive Committee of ICMI which took charge as of January 1, 1999 (see Vol. 46, June 1999, pp. 7-16).  In this issue, Igor F. Sharygin introduces himself to the readers of this Bulletin.  (Addresses of the EC members can be found on pages 1-2 of this Bulletin.)

Member: Igor Fedorovich Sharygin

I was born in 1937 in Moscow, the city where I have lived all my life, save one year during the World War 2 (1942) which I spent in evacuation in Kazan.  I went to an usual school in Moscow, and since I was in 5th grade I took part in various Mathematical Olympiads: local, as well as Moscow Math Olympiads.  I also visited the mathematical circle in Moscow State University.  After I graduated from school in 1954, I entered the Mech-Math Department of Moscow State University, and after graduation I continued my studies as a post-graduate student there.  In 1964 I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Mathematics.  I then taught Mathematics in various institutions of higher education in Moscow.  Since 1986 I have been working in the Russian Academy of Education (former Academy of Pedagogical Sciences) as a senior researcher.  Later I was promoted to the position of head researcher.

Ever since my University years I took pleasure in working with school students: I ran a circle for them, took part in preparing the Moscow Mathematical Olympiads.  In 1970, on the initiative of a number of young Russian mathematicians and physicists, the magazine Kvant was established.  Since the very first days of its existence, I worked on it.  My first articles on elementary mathematics were published there, and the problems I composed regularly appeared in its ?Problems? section.  Gradually, my favorite subject became elementary geometry.  Nowadays, I am still a member of the editorial board of Kvant, and I am the Russian head of the Mathematics Department of its sister-magazine Quantum, published in English in the USA.

It is difficult to mark the pivotal points of my career as a mathematics educator, first of all at the level of school mathematics.  To my opinion, my major accomplishment is my books (more than 30 in number), and the most important of my books are the school textbooks.  Among them, I should point out two books for primary school and several textbooks for junior and senior secondary school: Mathematics for the 5-6th grades (in co-operation with some other members of the Russian Academy of Education), Visionary Geometry for the 5-6th grades (in co-operation with my post-graduate student, Yerganjieva), Geometry for the 7-9th grades, and Geometry for the 10-11th grades.  Besides these, I have also published a number of handbooks for students entering institutions of higher education, and several problem-books in geometry. These problem-books comprise quite a big number of problems (more than 1000 problems in just one of them), whose complexity varies in a very large scale, rising from the ordinary schooling problems to those involving creative thinking.  The majority of these problems are original problems that I have composed myself.