Yuri, Logic, and Computer Science

Abstract

Yuri Gurevich was born on May 7, 1940, in Nikolayev, Ukraine, which was a part of Soviet Union at the time. A year later, World War II reached the Soviet Union, and Yuri’s father was assigned to work in a tank body factory near Stalingrad. So that’s where Yuri spent the second year of his life, until the battle of Stalingrad forced the family, except for his father, to flee. Their home was destroyed by bombing only hours after they left. But fleeing involved crossing the burning Volga and then traveling in a vastly overcrowded train, in which many of the refugees died; in fact, Yuri was told later that he was the only survivor among children of his age. His mother decided that they had to leave the train, and the family lived for two years in Uzbekistan. In May 1944, the family reunited in Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains, where the tank body factory had moved in the meantime, and that is where Yuri attended elementary and high school.