Interview with Maria Chudnovsky

<p>Maria Chudnovsky is a professor at Princeton University, working in graph theory and combinatorics. In this interview, Maria shares her personal experiences: learning Hebrew from math lessons, giving a talk at NASA, using math at her own wedding, and many more!</p> <p><br></p> <p>Maria's homepage: <a href="http://web.math.princeton.edu/~mchudnov/">http://web.math.princeton.edu/~mchudnov/</a></p> <p>Photo: from Maria's homepage</p> <p><br></p> <p>The essay we mentioned:</p> <p>W.T. Gowers "The two cultures of mathematics"</p> <p><a href="https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf">https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf</a></p> <p><br></p> <p>0:00 teaser</p> <p>0:29 respect for math at home</p> <p>2:43 math helps when you don’t speak the local language</p> <p>6:42 building a world around a research problem</p> <p>11:37 explaining math to a broad audience</p> <p>16:00 giving a talk at NASA</p> <p>19:42 applying graph theory to your wedding</p> <p>23:16 problem solving vs learning</p> <p>27:58 being bad at math olympiads&nbsp;</p> <p>30:40 working with your own students</p> <p>33:23 experience of doing a PhD</p> <p>36:02 memorizing math&nbsp;</p> <p>37:55 studying physics vs math</p> <p>43:43 maintaining a work-life balance</p> <p>49:08 everyone has self-doubts</p> <p>50:54 first time teaching a class</p> <p>55:46 final advice</p> <p><br></p>