Olga Kharlampovich

Education

She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the Leningrad State University (her doctoral advisor was Lev Shevrin) and Russian “Doctor of Science” in 1990 from the Moscow Steklov Institute.

Career

She is a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Hunter College. Prior to this she was a Professor of Mathematics at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where she has been working since 1990. She is mostly known for her example of a finitely presented 3-step solvable group with unsolvable word problem (solution of the Novikov–Adian problem) and for the solution together with A. Myasnikov of the Tarski conjecture (from 1945) about equivalence of first order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups (also solved by Zlil Sela) and decidability of this common theory.

Prior to her current appointment, she held a position at the Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, Russia.

She gave a negative answer to a question, posed in 1965 by Kargapolov and Mal"cev about the algorithmic decidability of the universal theory of the class of all finite nilpotent groups. Algebraic geometry for groups that was introduced by Baumslag, Myasnikov, Remeslennikov and Kharlampovich , became one of the new research directions in combinatorial group theory.

As of August 2011 she moved to Hunter College of the City University of New York as the Mary P. Dolciani Professor of Mathematics, where she is the inaugural holder of the first endowed professorship in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Achievements

• Foreign her undergraduate work on the Novikov–Adian problem she was awarded in 1981 a Medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Kharlampovich was awarded in 1996 the Krieger–Nelson Prize of the Content Management System for her work on algorithmic problems in varieties of groups and Lie algebras (the description of this work can be found in the survey paper with Sapir and on the prize web site).