In 1992, Maxim read one of my papers, and decided to write to me. He sent his letter to London, but I had by then moved to Sydney. Unfortunately, an unhelpful secretary did not send his letter on to me, but returned it to him instead. It was much later that Maxim finally managed to establish contact.
I invited him to visit me in Sydney, and he came in 1994. I also visited him in St Petersburg in 1995, but it was not until 1996 when he came back to Sydney that we really got stuck into a longstanding and difficult open problem in the theory of irregularities of point distribution. It took us three more years, with many emails and two meetings, in York in 1997 and in Kiel in 1998, before we finally solved the problem. This represents my best research to date.
Maxim is currently a member of the St Petersburg branch of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Here is a photo taken in 2016 at the discrepancy theory workshop held at the Villa Cipressi in Varenna in Italy. Maxim is on my right, while Anatoly Podkorytov is on my left.
