Anatoly Vershik

Anatoly Vershik died the day before yesterday.

As I have told here, he was the person who told me about the Urysohn space. I had given a talk at the ECM in Barcelona on the countable random graph, and after it he approached me and asked “Do you know about the Urysohn space?” We wrote a paper on it, extending some of my results on the random graph. Indeed, the Urysohn space has many different Abelian group structures.

He also made my two trips to St Petersburg possible, by having birthdays in 2004 and 2014 (actually his birthdays were in late December the previous year). I learned so much at these conferences, and had a small adventure when I came to leave after the first one.