A sad news reached us: mathematician Dr. Vitalii Makogin, a long-standing member of the German-Ukrainian Academic Society, unexpectedly passed away on 8 May 2024.
Vitalii was not only pationate about his research, but also cared strongly about Ukrainian culture and the history of German-Ukrainian relations.
Video-interview (Regio TV Stuttgart, 10.03.2022): Ukrainische Geschichte in Neu-Ulm, mit Vitalii Makogin (auf Deutsch)
A selection of publications of Dr. Vitalii Makogin
Vitalii graduated Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2011 and gained his PhD under the mentorship of Prof. Yulia Mishura from the same university in 2015 with the thesis on “Asymptotic behavior and trajectory properties of automodel fractional random fields”. He joined the Institute for Stochastics at the Ulm University in 2016.
Vitalii’s PhD mentor and collaborator, Prof. Dr. Yuliya Mishura (Department of Probability, Statistics and Actuarial Mathematics, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) stated: “It was very hard for everyone who knew Vitalii Makogin to hear about his premature death. This is a very heavy loss for all of us. Vitalii studied for a master’s degree in statistics in Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and already in his student years, he demonstrated good mathematical abilities and a passion for scientific work. After graduating from the master’s program, he worked for an insurance company for one year, weighed his strengths and finally decided that his life’s path would be in science. And he did have great abilities for analytical research and was able to obtain non-standard results using non-standard methods. As his supervisor, I admired his research. His dissertation was worthy of the highest praise. And after defending his dissertation, he always retained the ability to quickly assimilate new theories and obtain his own interesting results in areas new to him, and we continued our cooperation. I followed with great interest how, while working at the University of Ulm, Vitalii mastered more and more new mathematical and applied problems. It seemed that everything was ahead, and the work was just beginning, but the terrible news of Vitalii’s death put an end to these hopes. However, Vitalii’s scientific developments are undeniable, and they will be a step towards new achievements of new researchers.”
Prof. Mykola Leonenko (Cardiff University, UK), who collaborated with Vitalii, says: “Vitalii Makogin was a talented member of the Ukrainian probabilistic school. After finishing The Ukrainian Physics and Mathematics Lyceum (UPML) affiliated with Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Vitalii attended Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, earning Master’s degree and a PhD in Mathematics under supervision of Professor Yuliia Mishura. He then moved to Ulm University (Germany) to work as a research associate with Prof. Evgeny Spodarev. Vitalii’s academic work was focused on the stochastic processes in financial mathematics, limit theorems and extremes for random fields, stochastic geometry and point processes associated with nearest neighbour estimates of entropies. He maid important contributions to these fields publishing 16 peer reviewed papers.
We met in Cambridge in 2019 at the Workshop “Estimation of entropies and other functionals: Statistics meets information theory”, and decided to develop tests of goodness-of-fit based on the entropy estimates and related limit theorems for point processes. Our results where published in two papers and one more is in progress.
Vitalii was a beautiful person inside and out. His smile was so stunning it would light up the whole room.
He was a strong fighter with cancer and never told me about the illness. Only now I understood that it was part of his individuality and strong character.
Vitalii was a true lover of life; he was a humorous storyteller and it was always interesting to discuss with him music, literature, history, philosophy, politics and even sport.
Vitalii will never be forgotten but forever remembered and missed by all who were fortunate enough to know him.”
Members of the German-Ukrainian Academic Society express our deep condolences to Vitalii’s family, his colleagues, both in Kyiv (Department of Probability Theory, Statistics and Actuarial Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) and in Ulm (Institut für Stochastik, Universität Ulm).
