Vasilii (or Vasily) Alekseevich Iskovskikh (Василий Алексеевич Исковских, 1 July 1939, Orenburg Oblast – 4 January 2009, Moscow) was a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.
Born into a peasant family, Iskovskikh entered in 1958 the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Tashkent State University.
There he became an active participant in Igor Shafarevich's seminar and, following the recommendation of Yuri Manin, studied birational geometry.
[1] Much of the modern development of birational geometry began with Iskovskikh and Manin's «Трехмерные квартики и контрпримеры к проблеме Люрота» (Матем.
[1] In the 1970s Iskovskikh applied the method of maximal singularities to prove important theorems on birational maps of several classes of Fano threefolds.
[1][5] In 1983 Iskovskikh was an Invited Speaker with talk Algebraic 3-folds with special regard to the problem of rationality at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw.
[1][7] From June 29 to July 3, 2009, the Steklov Institute held an international conference on the geometry of algebraic varieties as a memorial to V. A.