Maria Chudnovsky is a leading mathematician working in the field of graph theory. She is a professor at the Department of Mathematics and The Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Faculty of Sciences at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow – the so called “Genius Grant”. And just recently, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for 2025.  

In this episode, she talks about “what makes a problem hard”... and why she does much of her groundbreaking work on her couch. She also attempts to explain some pretty advanced graph theory in terms we can all understand… and as a bonus, for any true math nerds out there: she shares a riddle that took her weeks to solve, so pay close attention!

Host: Jonathan Gal of SHEMMA

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