Victor Anatolyevich Vassiliev

Victor Anatolyevich Vassiliev or Vasilyev (Russian: Виктор Анатольевич Васильев; born April 10, 1956), is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is best known for his discovery of the Vassiliev invariants in knot theory (also known as finite type invariants), which subsume many previously discovered polynomial knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. He also works on singularity theory, topology, computational complexity theory, integral geometry, symplectic geometry, partial differential equations (geometry of wavefronts), complex analysis, combinatorics, and Picard–Lefschetz theory.

Vassiliev studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Lomonosov University in Moscow until 1981. From 1981 to 1987 he was Senior Researcher at the Documents and Archives Research Institute, Moscow and a part-time mathematics teacher at Specialized Mathematical School No. 57, Moscow. In 1982 he defended his Kandidat nauk thesis under Vladimir Arnold and received the title of Doktor nauk in 1992.