Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Ilya Zhitomirskiy (Russian Илья Алексеевич Житомирский, transliteration: Il'â Alekseevic Žitomirskij, born October 12, 1989 in Moscow, † November 12, 2011 in San Francisco) was a living in the United States of Russian software developers.

Life

His father and paternal grandfather were mathematicians. In 2000, the family immigrated to the United States and settled near Philadelphia, where Zhitomirskiy to 2007, the Lower Merion High School visited. He then studied mathematics, economics and computer science at Tulane University, the University of Maryland, College Park and at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

Together founded with his former fellow student Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, and he developed the open source software diaspora and the same social network. The four founders decided to start the project, after hearing a lecture in February 2010 by Eben Moglen about the threat of privacy by commercial Internet services. Moglen designated Zhitomirskiy retrospect as " the most idealistic " of the four founders of Diaspora. Given the choice to pursue an academic career or to establish the social network that he had opted for the latter, " because he wanted to do something with his time, which creates freedom."

Zhitomirskiy died at the age of 22, just before the launch of the public beta phase of the social network. The cause of death was announced not limited to, media reports, however, citing police officials and friends Zhitomirskiys many cases of suicide talk.