Loading ...Personal life
Buterin was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia to Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist and Natalia Ameline (née Chistyakova).[citation needed] He lived in the area until the age of six when his parents emigrated to Canada in search of better employment opportunities. While in grade three of elementary school in Canada, Buterin was placed into a class for gifted children and started to understand that he was drawn to math, programming, and economics. He also had the ability to add three digit numbers in his head at twice the speed of his peers.[4]. Buterin attended the Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto, for four years[5], which he said “proved to be among the most interesting and productive years of my life; the closer connection between students and teachers [and] the level of depth at which the material was taught, made me want to learn, and to focus on learning as my primary goal”[6]. Buterin has written that although he was “never particularly inspired by the traditional education system”[7], when subjects were presented with “dedication and focus on intellectual inquiry”, he “noticed my attitude and my results almost immediately and drastically change. Education is ultimately much more than simply memorizing individual facts, or even learning individual concepts. [What] matters most: learning how to think, learning how to reason and learning how to learn.”[8]
Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father at 19.[9] In 2012, he obtained a Bronze Medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics.[10] In 2013 he visited developers in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for code. He returned to Toronto later that year and published a white paper proposing Ethereum.[11] He attended the University of Waterloo but dropped out in 2014, when he received the Thiel Fellowship in the amount of $100,000,[12] and went to work on Ethereum full-time.[12].