Olga Kharlampovich

Olga Kharlampovich, PhD, is a Russian and Canadian mathematician who currently serves as the Mary P. Dolciani Professor of Mathematics at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Olga is 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. Algebraic geometry for groups, that was introduced by Baumslag, Myasnikov, Remeslennikov and Kharlampovich, is now one of the new research directions in combinatorial group theory.

In 1981, she was awarded a medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences for her undergraduate work on the Novikov-Adian problem. 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.

In 1996, she was awarded the Krieger–Nelson Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society 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). In 2015, she was awarded the Mal’cev Prize for the series of works on fundamental model-theoretic problems in algebra.

Olga was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 class “for contributions to algorithmic and geometric group theory, algebra and logic.”

• Leningrad University, Russia (PhD 1984)
• Moscow Steklov Institute, Russia (DSc 1990)

Courses taught include:

• MATH 150 Calculus with Analytic Geometry
• MATH 721 Algebra
• MATH 722 Algebra

CUNY Graduate Center Courses:

• MATH 705 Algebra
• MATH 872 Topics in Group Theory
• MATH 872 Linear groups
• MATH 795 Combinatorial Group Theory

• O. Kharlampovich, P. Weil, On the Generalized Membership Problem
  in Relatively Hyperbolic Groups, Chapter 11, Gurevich Festschrift, LNCS 12180, 2020.
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Myasnikov, R. Sklinos, Fraïssé Limits of Limit Groups. J. Algebra 545 (2020), 300–323
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Myasnikov, A. Taam, Effective Construction of Covers of Canonical Hom-diagrams for Equations Over Torsion-Free Hyperbolic Groups. Groups Complex. Cryptol. 11 (2019), no. 2, 83-101.
• O. Kharlampovich, L. Lopez, Bi-interpretability of Some Monoids with the Arithmetic and Applications, Semigroup Forum, 99(1), 126-139, 2019.
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Vdovina, Low Complexity Algorithms in Knot Theory. Internat. J. Algebra Comput. 29 (2019), no. 2, 245-262.
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Myasnikov, What does a Group Algebra of a Free Group “Know” About the Group?, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 169 (2018) 523-547.
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Myasnikov, Undecidability of Equations in Free Lie Algebras. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 371 (2019), no. 4, 2987-2999.
• O. Kharlampovich, A. Myasnikov, Model Theory and Algebraic Geometry in Groups, Non-Standard Actions and Algorithmic Problems, Proceedings of the Intern. Congress of Mathematicians 2014, Seoul, v. 2, invited lectures, 223-244.