Dmitry Khmelev was a young and talented mathematician. He was born on the 23rd of June, 1976 in a small town of Vyazniki, Russia. In 1991 he was accepted into a famous boarding school #18 in Moscow, founded by A.N. Kolmogorov. Having spent two years there, he was admitted to the undergraduate mathematics program at Moscow State University.
In 1998 he graduated with an honours diploma and was admitted to the PhD program at the MSU. In the years of 1999 to 2002 he was a graduate student at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge. He obtained two PhD degrees in the research areas of probability theory with applications to queueing networks (MSU, 2001) and one-dimensional dynamical systems (Heriot-Watt/Cambridge, 2002). He also conducted extensive research in text recognition and attribution. From August 2002 and to July 2004 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Toronto. In August 2004 he received a Bing Instructorship at the University of Austin, Texas, and has moved to the US. Dmitry died suddenly of an aortic rupture in the evening of the 24th (CDT) of October, 2004 in Austin. He is buried in his hometown Vyazniki, Russia.