What is the Strength of LEDAS? Part II

Stepan Gatilov, a young LEDAS employee, can be characterized by at least three facts. He:

- is a silver medalist of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, a two-time finalist of Topcoder Open (Algorithm) in Las Vegas, repeatedly participated in many other programming competitions, one of the coaches of a team of programmers  of the  Novosibirsk University,

- works successfully in one of the LEDAS key projects,

- closely acquainted with President Dmitry Medvedev.

1. Said Stepan: Olympiad programming (programming, math, physics, and other contests are in Russian usually called Olympiads) is very useful: thanks to it I learned to write codes rapidly and almost:) without bugs. Also for such Olympiads you need master a lot of standard algorithms and methods. This results in good understanding of what works fast and what works slow and how to improve performance of the latter. Unfortunately, Olympiad programming does not teach you how to work in large projects because their tasks usually consist of not more than couple pages of very sophisticated code…      

2.  Well, Stepan acquires skills of industrial software development in the projects of LEDAS, see ledas.com and drivingdimensions.com. In particular, he works at a non-linear solver which is actually a computational core of main LEDAS products: from geometric solvers (LGS 2D and LGS 3D) to applications like LDD SketchUp and  LDD Rhino.

3. Stepan Gatilov met Dmitry Medvedev in 2007 when the Novosibirsk programming team became a silver medalist of a programming world championship in Japan. At that time, current Russian President was just a first deputy of the  Russian prime minister. This is a dialog between S.Gatilov (SG, at the photo, second from right) and D.Medvedev  (DM, third from right).

SG: We have been participating in programming Olympiads, well, defending the honor of the country, but back home we're having some problems with our university lessons. Just today, for example, I skip my second consecutive Colloquium on English.

DM: If you wish, I can write an excusable note to your teacher…

SG: I believe it would be more effective if you write an autograph on a postcard 

DM: OK, no problem. You are really smart guy! What is your teacher’s name?

SG: Irina Gennad’evna

DM: Well, when being a university professor, I took a lot of exams but such excuse is something new for me… Is your Colloquium today?  

SG: Yes, the first one was when I was in Tokio, the second – today.

DM: Interesting, they organize Olympiads just when you should pass your colloquiums! If you will further be so successful you may probably miss some more university colloquiums.   

SG: No, no, I should attend them!

DM: Why?

Тatiana Tchurina (trainer): For the University, the key point is studying, not Olympiad.  If somebody gets “satisfactory” (the more so – unsatisfactory!), we do not take such a student to our Olympiad team. This is policy of the university.

DM: So, I am writing: “Irina Gennadievna, Stepan missed your lesson by excusable reasons, please do not scold him!”

SG: Thank you! What about making a photo together with you?

DM: No problems, with pleasure!

See What is the Strength of LEDAS. Part 1   

Source about meeting with D.Medvedev .