Yurii Gennadievich Prokhorov (on his sixtieth birthday)

turned 60 years of age.He is widely recognized as one of the global leaders in contemporary birational algebraic geometry.He was born in the town of Orekhovo-Zuevo in Moscow Oblast, in a family of engineers.While still in school, he demonstrated talents for the exact sciences, which in 1979 earned him an invitation to Boarding School No. 18, a physics-mathematics school affiliated with Moscow State University.After graduating successfully in 1981, he enrolled in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics (Mechmat) at Moscow State University (MSU).In the vibrant scientific atmosphere of Mechmat in the early 1980s, Yuri Prokhorov was fortunate to quickly find a mentor, Vasily Alekseevich Iskovskikh, who became his teacher, senior colleague, coauthor, and a kindred spirit in life principles.Thus Yuri joined the famous Soviet algebraic geometry school founded by I. R. Shafarevich.One of the key research fronts during that period concerned birational geometry of special classes of three-dimensional algebraic varieties.These problems became the focus of Prokhorov's work -initially under Iskovskikh's guidance, and later, after his teacher's untimely death, as the informal leader of the vibrant research community now known as the Iskovskikh School.After defending his undergraduate thesis in 1986, Prokhorov continued research under Iskovskikh's supervision in the graduate program at Mechmat, defending his Kandidat dissertation "Geometric properties of Fano varieties" in 1990.