Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Georgy Adelson-Velsky was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. In 1962 he and Evgenii Landis invented the AVL tree, generally regarded as the first self-balancing binary search tree data structure. From 1963 he led a computer chess program at Moscow's Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, whose system was among the first to use bitboards and defeated the American Kotok-McCarthy program in a 1966 match; the program later grew into Kaissa, the first world computer chess champion. He earned his doctorate under Israel Gelfand, was the last student of Nikolai Luzin, and moved to Israel in 1992 to teach at Bar-Ilan University.