Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is one of the main developers of Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union; received a master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University in Samarkand (now Uzbekistan), in 1958; and received a Ph.D in statistics from the Institute of Control Science in Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 until 1990, and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department.

In 1991 he joined AT&T Bell Labs (later Shannon Labs), where notably he and his colleagues developed the support vector machine. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the machine learning community, including handwriting recognition. In 1995 he was appointed Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Currently, as well as working for NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, he also holds a position at Columbia University, New York, New York.

In 2006, Vapnik was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.