> There’s a professor from the University of Moscow that – I’m not sure if he still teaches, or used to teach on astrophysics, and then hacks on Postgres for fun.

I'm pretty sure he's talking about Oleg Bartunov! He's one of the best speakers about Postgresql at Russian Highload conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhvqly8MtoI&list=PLH-XmS0lSi...