Mikhail Khovanov (; born 13 January 1972) is a Russian professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University who works on representation theory, knot theory, and algebraic topology. He is known for introducing Khovanov homology for links,"Our hope for the week was to understand and improve Khovanov's seminal work on the categorification of the Jones polynomial" (Page 337). which was one of the first examples of categorification.
Education and career Khovanov graduated from Moscow State School 57 mathematical class in 1988. He earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1997,Khovanov's PhD dissertation, "Graphical calculus, canonical bases and Kazhdan-Lusztig theory" (1997). where he studied under Igor Frenkel.
Khovanov was a faculty member at UC Davis before moving to Columbia University."Mathematics", UC Davis Wiki, 4 April 2007. "Mikhail Khovanov was in the department when he developed the famous homology theory that bears his name."
He is a half-brother of Tanya Khovanova.
References
External links Khovanov's faculty page at Columbia List of Khovanov's publications