On the occasion of his 60th birthday.
V. F. Kirichenko was born on May 11, 1947 in Magadan region of Russia.
In 1972 he graduated summa cum laude (with highest honors) from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University (MSU).
In 1975 he finished his graduate studies in the Department of Differential Geometry of MSU. In 1976 he defended his Ph. D. thesis entitled New Results in the Theory of K-Spaces, in which he obtained a series of deep results on the geometry of one of the most interesting classes of Hermitian manifolds.
After graduation he became an Assistant Professor of the Department of Special Mathematical Courses of Moscow Power Institute. In 1980 he was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 1987 to Professor of the same department. Since 1990 Kirichenko is Professor of the Geometry Department of the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1999 he became the chairperson of this department.
The circle of scientific interests of Kirichenko is in differential geometry and its applications. In 1985 he defended the doctoral dissertation entitled Differential Geometry of Generalized Hermitian Manifolds. In this work he demonstrated a possibility to study from the same point of view different differential-geometric structures such as almost Hermitian structures, almost contact structures, almost quaternion structures, f-structures of Kentaro Yano, and their hyperbolic analogues.
He developed a new apparatus for investigation of almost Hermitian structures and applying it obtained many results published in prestigious Russian and foreign mathematical journals as well as in his monograph Differential-Geometric Structures on a Manifold (Moscow, 2003). These results were reported in the series of international conferences including the 4th International Congress of Mathematicians (Zurich, 1994) and the 2nd European Mathematical Congress (Budapest, 1996).
Kirichenko was a supervisor of many Ph. D. students. Up to now, 26 his students defended their Ph. D. theses.
We, friends and colleagues of Vadim Kirichenko wish him good health, happiness and success in his research.
V. Goldberg, A. Kushner, V. Kuzakon