Maria Chudnovsky (born January 6, 1977) is an

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

mathematician working on

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...

and

combinatorial optimization Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects, where the set of feasible solutions is discrete or can be reduced to a discrete set. Typical combi ...

. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

Education and career

Chudnovsky is a professor in the department of mathematics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. She grew up in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

(attended Saint Petersburg Lyceum 30) and

, studying at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from

under the supervision of Paul Seymour (mathematician), Paul Seymour. After postdoctoral research at the Clay Mathematics Institute,. she became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 2005, and moved to Columbia University in 2006. By 2014, she was the Liu Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia. She returned to Princeton as a professor of mathematics in 2015.

Research

Chudnovsky's contributions to

include the proof of the strong perfect graph theorem (with Neil Robertson (mathematician), Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour (mathematician), Paul Seymour, and Robin Thomas (mathematician), Robin Thomas) characterizing perfect graphs as being exactly the graphs with no odd induced subgraph, induced cycle (graph theory), cycles of length at least 5 or their complement graph, complements. Other research contributions of Chudnovsky include co-authorship of the first polynomial time, polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing perfect graphs (time bounded by a polynomial of degree 9), and of a structural characterization of the claw-free graphs.

Selected publications

*. *. *. *

Awards and honors

In 2004 Chudnovsky was named one of the "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science, Popular Science magazine. Her work on the strong perfect graph theorem won for her and her co-authors the 2009 Fulkerson Prize. In 2012 she was awarded a "genius award" under the MacArthur Fellows Program.

Personal life

She is a citizen of Israel and a permanent resident of the US. In 2012, she married Daniel Panner, a viola player who teaches at Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School. They have a son named Rafael.

References

External links

Chudnovsky's home page at Princeton University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chudnovsky, Maria Living people Graph theorists Princeton University alumni Princeton University faculty Columbia University faculty Israeli mathematicians Women mathematicians 1977 births MacArthur Fellows Combinatorialists