Interview with Maria Chudnovsky

Math-Life Balance

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!

Maria's homepage: http://web.math.princeton.edu/~mchudnov/

Photo: from Maria's homepage

The essay we mentioned:

W.T. Gowers "The two cultures of mathematics"

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf

0:00 teaser

0:29 respect for math at home

2:43 math helps when you don’t speak the local language

6:42 building a world around a research problem

11:37 explaining math to a broad audience

16:00 giving a talk at NASA

19:42 applying graph theory to your wedding

23:16 problem solving vs learning

27:58 being bad at math olympiads

30:40 working with your own students

33:23 experience of doing a PhD

36:02 memorizing math

37:55 studying physics vs math

43:43 maintaining a work-life balance

49:08 everyone has self-doubts

50:54 first time teaching a class

55:46 final advice