(17/11/1944 - 22/07/2011)

Yuri Stroganov was born November 17, 1944, to the family of a naval officer. His mathematical talent already manifested itself in his youth, when he participated in physical and mathematical Olympiads. In 1960, he entered the famous Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and after graduation continued his studies as a post-graduate.

In 1969, Yuri Stroganov was hired in the Neutrino Physics Division of the Institute for High Energy Physics (Protvino, Russia). Here he achieved a number of important results that contributed to the success of the neutrino experiments. He then worked for several years in the COMPASS group (a partner of the Particle Data group), and in 1995, after defending his Doctor of Sciences thesis (the Russian analogue of the habilitation), he was transferred to the Division of Theoretical Physics. While working in the Neutrino Physics Division, in addition to problems related to experimental physics, he began a series of studies in mathematical physics, which placed him at the very cutting edge of science.

Yuri Stroganov was one of the most talented researchers in theoretical and mathematical physics. A number of fundamental results in statistical mechanics and the combinatorics of lattice models will be always related to his name. The method of inversion relations for the calculation of the partition function in two dimensional models, proposed by him, is a classical result in the theory of quantum integrable systems. He is responsible for a number of important results on the enumerations of alternating sign matrices. Some amazing combinatorial regularities for the components of the ground state vector of various quantum chains, discovered by Yuri Stroganov, justly bear his name.