Vitalii Chornobyl
Chief Technology Officer at Stealth Startup
New York City Metropolitan Area, United States
About Vitalii Chornobyl
Vitalii Chornobyl is Chief Technology Officer at Stealth Startup. Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States.
Vitalii Chornobyl is a technologist with more than 40 years of experience. Born in Moscow in 1969 to Ukrainian academics – his mother was a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University; his father, a professor of theoretical physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) – Chornobyl solved his first differential equation when he was 7. By age 10, he was writing code for MIPT’s ES EVM mainframes. In 1980, he was unofficially tasked with writing software for MIPT’s M-222 minicomputers; in 1981, he designed a monotonic sorting algorithm that improved the M-222’s merge performance by 8.1%. In 1982, with encouragement from physicist Nikolay Nekrasov, Chornobyl devised a microcode change that reduced the time it took the M-222 to compute a series of complex Von Zeipel transformations by more than 50%, from >507 hours down to <244. In 1982, he secured a prestigious fellowship with the Soviet Air Defense Forces (SADF). Chornobyl spent most of 1982 and the first half of 1983 rewriting the software used to analyze the data collected by the Soviet Union’s Oko early-warning satellite network. His work radically enhanced Oko’s ability to rapidly detect and track multiple incoming ICBMs. At the end of his fellowship, Chornobyl designed new software to control for the effects of refracted sunlight on Oko’s Molniya-orbit satellites. Chornobyl’s was an erratic émigré journey: in the half-decade prior to the fall of the former Soviet Union, he and his family emigrated from Moscow to Minsk; by the early-1990s, Chornobyl, then 20, and his oldest brother, Semyon, had settled in New Rochelle, NY. It was during this period that he began to experiment with technical writing, authoring a series of classic Usenet threads that explored the design of Intel’s then-new i860 microprocessor. He is the co-author, along with fellow émigré Pavel Chichikov, of Eleven Ecstatic Discourses: On Programming Intel’s Revolutionary i860.
Skills
Additional experience
Business Owner and President
Ontos
January 1994 – September 2024
Education
- Le DENS en lettres, Ecole normale supérieure
- Doctor of Science, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University) (MIPT)