Personal Background
Dmitry Shparo was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1941, shortly after the Soviet Union was invaded by German troops. Shparo was the son of Igor and Nina (née Gimers) Shparo. His father was a journalist and a fiction writer, while his mother was a mathematician.
In 1927, when Shparo's mother was only three years old, her father was arrested and declared an "enemy of the nation". He was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where he disappeared, never to be heard from again.
In 1953, following Joseph Stalin's death, Nina Gimer got a job at the Institute of Applied Mechanics, where she was involved in calculating the trajectories of both the first Soviet cruise missile and the first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
- Educational background
In 1967, Shparo graduated from the Moscow State University, earning a PhD in Mathematics. Following graduation, he began teaching full-time at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys (MISIS).
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