He is the elder brother of Pavel Durov, with whom he founded the social networking site VK and later Telegram Messenger.
[5] Competing as "Nikolai Dourov", he won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad in the three years he participated of 1996, 1997, and 1998.
[11] He received his first PhD from Saint Petersburg State University in 2005 with his thesis "New Approach to Arakelov Geometry".
[12] Continuing at the University of Bonn, he obtained in 2007 a second PhD under the supervision of Gerd Faltings with his thesis on singular Arakelov geometry.
He held the position of senior research fellow at the Laboratory of Algebra and Number Theory at the St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.