Maria Chudnovsky is a professor in the department of mathematics at Princeton University. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studying at the Technion and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton under the supervision of Paul Seymour. She moved to Columbia after being a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow and assistant professor at Princeton. Chudnovsky's contributions to graph theory include the proof of the strong perfect graph theorem with Robertson, Seymour and Thomas characterizing perfect graphs as being exactly the graphs with no odd induced cycles of length at least 5 or their complements. Other research contributions of Chudnovsky include coauthorship of the first polynomial time algorithm for recognizing perfect graphs and of a structural characterization of the clawfree graphs.

Interview : Stéphanie VAREILLES