Guardian News and Media
Moscow
A renowned mathematician and University of London professor has been found dead after losing his way in a Moscow park.
Alexey Chervonenkis, 76, emeritus professor of computer science at Royal Holloway, University of London, died of hypothermia after going astray in a swampy area, according to the search party that found his body.
Chervonenkis had gone for a walk on Sunday in Losiny Ostrov (“Moose Island”), a 116,000-sq-km national park located on the north-eastern edge of Moscow, near his home. He called his wife at 8.20pm to say he had become lost in a swamp and was tired but would try to make his way out, his widow told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.
When he was still lost an hour later, she suggested they call emergency services, but Chervonenkis said they would not be able to find him.
In a final call around midnight, the professor said he was tired and his phone was turned off.
Chervonenkis’s eldest son hired a helicopter to look for him, and the family called Liza Alert, a volunteer organisation that searches for missing people. Over the next two days, the group led a search party of two helicopters and 182 volunteers, including an American professor who had come to Moscow to meet Chervonenkis.
One of the helicopters spotted his body from the air and the leader of the search party later said he had died of hypothermia.
Temperatures had dropped below freezing the night he disappeared. “The search party passed very near him, but there’s a lot of grass there and lots of water spots because it’s a swamp, and finding a person laying in the grass is nearly impossible,” Liza Alert search director Grigory Sergeyev said.
It took until the early hours of Wednesday for his body to be removed due to delays with police and rescue personnel, he added.
According to a message of remembrance on Chervonenkis’s staff profile page at the University of London, he enjoyed long walks in both London and his native Moscow.
The professor would often cover 15-20km in a day and knew how to navigate in the forest, his wife told Moskovsky Komsomolets. He reportedly had a map of the park with him on Sunday. “He was a great teacher and friend, and will be deeply missed,” the University of London message read.
Chervonenkis split his time between the computer learning research centre at the University of London and the research institute of control problems at the Russian Academy of Science, in Moscow, it said. The professor was a leading expert in his field and developed the new research area of statistical learning theory with fellow mathematician Vladimir Vapnik, the university said.
Their Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory of computational learning is well known today. In 2013, a reported 149 people lost their way in the forests of the Moscow region, 13 of whom were found dead and 20 of whom remain missing.
