I was born in Yerevan in 1989. Shortly, after my birth my parents graduated from Yerevan State Medical University and went to Moscow to continue education, leaving me with grandparents in Armenia in small village Bagratashen on the border with Georgia. When I was five years old my grandfather began to teach me read and write in Armenian and Russian languages, later he also taught me basics of logics and mathematics. At the age of seven I moved to Moscow and went to usual public school. In school I became interested in mathematics and its application to solving real world problems, especially computer science and economics. In last two years of secondary school I participated in large number of scientific competitions. I took first prize in a local competition in mathematics and participated in Moscow contest in the same subject. Then having won Moscow and the all-Russian Olympiad in economics I was awarded the Presidential Scholarship and accepted for a double degree program in State University – Higher School of Economics and University of London (London School of Economics) without exams. During my university years I continued studying mathematics, despite the fact that my major was economics the program was highly quantitative.

We had large number of courses on probability theory and mathematical statistics and later I studied Measure Theory and Stochastic Analysis. So I became interested in area of mathematics, which studied random phenomena. As any other area of mathematics it is incredibly beautiful, but what makes it so important is the wide range of applications. It is used in experimental physics, to analyse the results of experiments, in medicine for drug testing and during last decades stochastic analysis became particularly important in economics and finance. For instance Central Banks use system of stochastic differential equations to analyse potential effects of monetary policy they are going to implement, private banks use it for derivative valuation , algorithmic trading. Modern Economics and Finance is virtually impossible to imagine without significant element of Stochastic Modelling. And Since I was interested in economics and finance and mathematics I decided to apply to Master of Arts in Mathematics of Finance at Columbia University.