Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 mathematician. She is professor in the departments of mathematics and of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. She grew up in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

 and Israel, studying at the Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 under the supervision of Paul Seymour. She moved to Columbia after being a Clay Mathematics Institute

Clay Mathematics Institute

The Clay Mathematics Institute is a private, non-profit foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. It gives out various awards and sponsorships to promising mathematicians. The institute was founded in 1998...

 research fellow and assistant professor at Princeton. In 2004 was named one of the “Brilliant 10” by Popular Science magazine

Popular Science

Popular Science is an American monthly magazine founded in 1872 carrying articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. Popular Science has won over 58 awards, including the ASME awards for its journalistic excellence in both 2003 and 2004...

. Among her contributions to graph theory

Graph theory

In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

 is developing a proof to the strong perfect graph theorem

Perfect graph

In graph theory, a perfect graph is a graph in which the chromatic number of every induced subgraph equals the size of the largest clique of that subgraph....

 characterizing perfect graphs as being exactly the graphs with no odd induced cycles

Cycle (graph theory)

In graph theory, the term cycle may refer to a closed path. If repeated vertices are allowed, it is more often called a closed walk. If the path is a simple path, with no repeated vertices or edges other than the starting and ending vertices, it may also be called a simple cycle, circuit, circle,...

 or their complements

Complement graph

In graph theory, the complement or inverse of a graph G is a graph H on the same vertices such that two vertices of H are adjacent if and only if they are not adjacent in G. That is, to generate the complement of a graph, one fills in all the missing edges required to form a complete graph, and...

.

External links

• Chudnovsky's home page at Columbia U.