Igor Rivin was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where he was fortunate enough to study with H. S. M. Coxeter and Ed Bierstone. He went on to study with Bill Thurston at Princeton University, and his checkered career included working with John McCarthy at Stanford (as Applications Director of the QLISP project on parallel symbolic computing), and with Stephen Wofram at Wolfram Research (as Director of Advanced Development for Mathematica, before returning to pure Mathematics. His research interests include hyperbolic geometry, geometry and topology of surfaces, convexity, combinatorial geometry, algebraic groups, probability theory, graph theory, dynamics, finance, and computational crystallography, where he has a long-running research collaboration with Mike Treacy on computational analysis of zeolites.