Olga Kharlampovich

Who is Olga Kharlampovich?

Olga Kharlampovich is a Canadian mathematician working in the area of group theory. She is a professor at the CUNY 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 and for the solution together with A. Myasnikov of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups and decidability of this common theory.

She received her Ph.D. from the Leningrad State University and Russian “Doctor of Science” in 1990 from the Moscow Steklov Institute. Prior to her current appointment at McGill University, she held a position at the Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, Russia. For her undergraduate work on the Novikov–Adian problem she was awarded in 1981 a Medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. 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. Kharlampovich was awarded in 1996 the Krieger–Nelson Prize of the CMS for her work on algorithmic problems in varieties of groups and Lie algebras. Algebraic geometry for groups that was introduced by Baumslag, Myasnikov, Remeslennikov and Kharlampovich, became one of the new research directions in combinatorial group theory.