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
