Andriy Tykhonovych Slyusarchuk is a Ukrainian mnemonist who has claimed to be a general aviation pilot, a psychotherapist, a Doctor of Science in medicine, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a neurosurgeon.
59 Facts About Andriy Slyusarchuk
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Andriy Slyusarchuk performed brain surgery throughout Ukraine in state and municipal hospitals.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed to have set several world records in mnemonics by memorizing data and figures and performing complex calculations in his mind.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's education began in an institutional school for intellectually-disabled infant orphans in the village of Hryshkivtsi.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was diagnosed with schizophrenia, oligophrenia, cerebral palsy, hepatitis and nephropathy.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed he obtained a Doctor of Science degree, which allowed him to go into medical practice, performing neurosurgery, appearing on radio and television, granting interviews and publicly demonstrating his mnemonic skills.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk met a Ukrainian president, attended private clubs and meetings of Ukrainian nomenklatura, befriended ministers and received a State Prize.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk forged documents, cheated the public at chess matches and memory demonstrations and practiced medicine without a license.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was interviewed by major newspapers, such as Trud:.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine on 10 May 1971.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's 21-year-old mother, Natalia Tykhonovna Slyusarchuk of Zhytomyr, left her newborn son at a maternity home.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk did not know the name of the father of her child, and Slyusarchuk's middle name was recorded on his birth certificate as "Tykhonovych".
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was hospitalized at the Zhytomyr psychiatric hospital eight times between 1974 and 1987.
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From 1980 to 1987 Andriy Slyusarchuk lived and studied at an institutional school for young orphans in the town of Hryshkivtsi in Berdychiv Raion, receiving a certificate for the completion of his education there.
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From 1987 to 1989, Andriy Slyusarchuk studied in the 208th group at the inter-regional Higher Vocational School of Railway Transport in Kozyatyn, Vinnytsia Oblast, to become a plasterer-tiler-facing worker.
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In 1993 Andriy Slyusarchuk was turned down for a position as a neurosurgeon at the hospital in Novoyavorivsk, but later practiced medicine elsewhere.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's lectures were popular, with students cutting classes to listen to him, and were attended by other teachers.
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Between 2003 and 2006 Andriy Slyusarchuk lived in a Lviv Polytechnic National University dormitory where he fraudulently diagnosed students and "treated" them with psychotropic drugs.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk extorted large amounts of money from parents for treatment, telling them that their children would commit suicide without it, and distributed unapproved drugs for $4,000 per ampoule.
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On 28 February 2006, Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed to have set a record by memorizing the numbers which make up pi.
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In March 2006, Andriy Slyusarchuk began work as an associate professor at the Chornovil Lviv State Institute of Modern Technology and Management and became a professor in the general-law department that year.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk lectured on the subject of memory, and Polishchuk said that colleagues had found Andriy Slyusarchuk's 2002 dissertation on the Internet.
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Polishchuk later found a 2000 dissertation by Nikolai Ershov in the Russian State Library in Moscow; the only difference between Ershov's and Andriy Slyusarchuk's dissertations was in the title.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was a professor in the Department of Information Systems and Networks at Lviv Polytechnic from September 2009 to June 2011.
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From 9 December 2009 to 11 March 2010, Andriy Slyusarchuk was an adviser to Oleksandr Turchynov in the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk co-hosted the program Mind Games on Radio Era from 2009 to 2011.
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On 22 December 2009, Andriy Slyusarchuk discussed an Institute of the Brain with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko; Yushchenko issued a decree establishing it that same day.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk said in another interview that the institute's annual budget would be UAH500 million.
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In 2010 Andriy Slyusarchuk practiced disaster medicine, performed surgery throughout Ukraine and conducted behavioral experiments on rats in his one-room apartment with his assistant Chervoniy, using a neuromagnetic stimulator and other devices.
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Between 2 February and 1 March 2012, Andriy Slyusarchuk underwent a medical and psychiatric examination at the Lviv Oblast Psychiatric Hospital.
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Between 2 July and fall 2012, Andriy Slyusarchuk received a second psychiatric examination at the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital in Kiev.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's father was Mushegyan Vartan Aramovich, an ethnic Armenian.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk said that he graduated from a secondary school in Vinnytsia at the age of nine.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was sent to an institution for the mentally-ill children.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was placed in a Soviet orphanage where he was misunderstood by his teachers and encouraged to conform.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk taught himself by reading the book Your Abilities, Man, which was given to him by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed to have graduated from the Russian National Research Medical University with an honorable diploma at 18, beginning a postgraduate course without the usual internship.
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In June 2009, after claiming a world record for memorizing pi by being able to recite randomly selected sequences from the first 30 million places of pi, Andriy Slyusarchuk was congratulated by Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko and funding for a research center for the development of Andriy Slyusarchuk's methodology was discussed.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed that his memorization skills were based on mental associations between figures, images, words, numbers and a photographic memory of everything on which he concentrates.
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Memorizing thousands of chess games reportedly helped him defeat the Rybka-4; according to Yurchenko, Andriy Slyusarchuk just recalled memorized games.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed to have set records for memorizing large amounts of digital data, sequences of geometric figures, words and other information, including one million digits of the figure pi.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk claimed to have memorized 200 million decimal places of pi by October 2010.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk was known for his hypnotic skill; he claimed the ability to hypnotize people to feel no pain when burned.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's televised demonstration of chess-position memory was criticized by invited chess master Grigoriy Timoshenko, who said that he was 99.9-percent sure that the performance was fake, and a New York Times article called Slyusarchuk "an illusionist".
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Three weeks later, the newspaper published a letter from the Russian National Research Medical University saying that Andriy Slyusarchuk had not studied at the university.
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On 10 January 2012 the newspaper released a video of brain surgery performed by Andriy Slyusarchuk, surrounded by assistants in an operating room; in the video, he wiped his scalpel with cotton wool before incising the patient's brain.
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From 2 February to 1 March 2012, Andriy Slyusarchuk underwent a psychiatric examination at Lviv Oblast Psychiatric Hospital.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk received a second psychiatric examination at Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital in Kiev from 2 July to the fall of 2012.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk believes that Slyusarchuk participated in the secret pilot projects, receiving a professorship in return.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk maintained that his case was fabricated by the Prosecutor General and the Security Service of Ukraine.
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In 2003 Andriy Slyusarchuk reportedly met with Russian Federal Security Service agents, agreeing in writing not to disclose the results of his scientific works and advising the Ukrainian government.
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Under questioning, the head of the university archives testified that Andriy Slyusarchuk showed her his damaged diploma in 2005 and his full name was legible.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk did so, adding the instructions: "Carry out according to procedure"; the university neither proved nor disproved whether Slyusarchuk originally received a diploma from them.
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At the press conference, Andriy Slyusarchuk's diplomas were demonstrated to be scanned documents.
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The court upheld victim claims, with Andriy Slyusarchuk fined about $40,000.
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In September 2014, Andriy Slyusarchuk dismissed his attorneys, telling them that for what he paid for their services he could have bought ten more diplomas.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's research involved the technology of inputting large amounts of information into electronic databases and its playback.
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Andriy Slyusarchuk's research was nominated by the academic administration of Lviv Polytechnic for the State Prize, and the issue was debated in Kiev by a commission of Ukrainian scientists.
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Documentaries and TV programs have been made about Andriy Slyusarchuk, including a 2008 BBC documentary.