Alexey Chervonenkis

He introduced the VC dimension and the generalized portrait method that grew into the Support Vector Machine.

Royal Holloway, where he was an emeritus professor, names three achievements. The first is the method of generalized portrait, which was later developed into the well-known Support Vector Machine. The second is the derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniform convergence of the frequency of an event to its probability over a class of events. The third is the introduction of a new characteristic of a class of sets, later called the VC dimension. With Vladimir Vapnik he developed the research area of statistical learning theory, including the inductive principle of structural risk minimization.