Tanya Khovanova

Tanya Khovanova (, also spelled Tatyana Hovanova; born 25 January 1959) is a Soviet-American mathematician who became the second female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiads. She is a lecturer in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education As a high school student, Khovanova became a member of the Soviet team for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). In the summer of 1975, Valery Senderov gave the team a list of difficult mathematical problems used in the entrance exams of Moscow State University to discriminate against Soviet Jews, a topic she later wrote about. Khovanova won the silver medal at the 1975 IMO, and a gold medal at the 1976 Olympiad. Her finish at the 1976 Olympiad was second among all competitors, the highest achievement for female students until 1984, when Karin Gröger from East Germany tied for the first place. Khovanova graduated with honors from Moscow State University (MSU) with a master's degree in mathematics in 1981. She completed her Ph.D. at MSU in 1988 with Israel Gelfand as her doctoral advisor. Career Khovanova left the Soviet Union in 1990, and worked for several years in Israel and the US as a postdoctoral researcher. However, she stopped working as a researcher to raise her children, and then worked in the telecommunications and military contracting industry, before returning to academia as a lecturer at MIT.