Maria Chudnovsky

Maria Chudnovsky (born 1977) is an Israeli-American mathematician working on graph theory and combinatorial optimization, and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studied at the Technion, and received her PhD from Princeton University in 2003 under Paul Seymour. After a postdoctoral position at the Clay Mathematics Institute she taught at Princeton and Columbia, and returned to Princeton as a professor of mathematics in 2015. With Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour and Robin Thomas she proved the strong perfect graph theorem, which characterizes perfect graphs as those with no odd induced cycle of length at least five and no complement of one. She also co-authored the first polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing perfect graphs, a structural characterization of claw-free graphs, and progress on the Erdos-Hajnal conjecture, and won the 2009 Fulkerson Prize with her co-authors.