Lead Mentors

Jesse Geneson

Jesse Geneson is a mathematician and data scientist. His research interests are in graph theory, combinatorics, and computing. He graduated from Harvard University in 2010 and earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 2015. He has mentored nine math research projects at MIT including the winner of the 2014 Siemens individual competition, the fifth prize in the 2012 Siemens team competition, and the third prize in the 2011 Siemens individual competition. The results of these projects were published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, and Discrete Mathematics

Ben Yang

Ben Yang is a Ph.D. student in the MIT Math Department. His research area is incidence geometry. He was an MIT SPUR mentor in 2013, winning the Rogers Prize for the best paper with his students, Zipei Nie and Anthony Wang. He also was an MIT PRIMES mentor in 2014, and his student Joseph Zurier won the 2014 Siemens 2nd Prize and the 2015 Intel STS semifinalist award.

Peter Tian

Peter Tian is an undergraduate student at Harvard University. He was a four time USA Math Olympiad qualifier, a participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program, and a Research Science Institute alumnus. As a 2014 MIT PRIMES-USA student, Peter won the 2014 Siemens Competition individual grand prize and became a Davidson Fellow in 2015. In his spare time, he enjoys watching sports, playing ping pong, and running.

Deven Ware

Deven joined AoPS in 2014. During this same year he earned both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mathematics from UCLA. While there, he led the Intermediate Circle at the Los Angeles Math Circle and played with electron lasers for fun. Outside of school, he attended MathPath twice as a counselor and attended the UCLA Logic Summer School as a student. In his free time, Deven enjoys solving logic puzzles and pondering about interesting math problems. He also acknowledges the concerning fact that in this bio he has claimed attending school as one of his outside of school activities.

Advisors

Pavel Etingof

Pavel Etingof is Professor of Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at MIT. Pavel received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University. Pavel's research interests are noncommutative algebra, representation theory, and mathematical physics. Pavel led mathematics research programs for high school students at the Clay Mathematics Research Academy, the Research Science Institute (RSI), and SPUR at MIT. He co-founded MIT PRIMES program and has served as its Chief Research Advisor since 2010. Pavel's students have won multiple top awards at national science competitions for high school students.

When Pavel isn't doing math, he enjoys mycology and can be found identifying, collecting, and cooking mushrooms for fun(gi).

Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch is the Director of Research and Reading Programs in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He co-founded MIT PRIMES program in 2010 and directed RSI and SPUR programs since 2012, and DRP and UROP+ programs since 2014. His research interests include social and cultural history of mathematics, cybernetics, astronautics, and computing. His current research project is on the culture of abstract algebra in the second half of the twentieth century. Slava holds two doctoral degrees, in history and social study of science and technology from MIT and in philosophy of science from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He has taught at MIT since 1999, but when nobody is watching, writes poetry!

Tanya Khovanova

Tanya Khovanova is a Lecturer at MIT and a freelance mathematician. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Moscow State University in 1988. At that time her research interests were in representation theory, integrable systems, super-string theory and quantum groups. Her research was interrupted by a period of employment in industry, where she became interested in algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography and networks. Several years ago she resigned from industry to return to research. Her current interests lie in recreational mathematics including puzzles, magic tricks, combinatorics, number theory, geometry, and probability theory. Her website is located at tanyakhovanova.com, her highly popular math blog at blog.tanyakhovanova.com and her Number Gossip website at numbergossip.com.

Tanya Khovanova works with gifted children in a variety of settings. At the AMSA Charter School in Massachusetts, she coaches the math competition team. She also mentors and supervises high school students who want to do research in mathematics. She works with the two most successful programs that focus on helping kids do research: RSI and PRIMES-MIT.

Jeremy Copeland

Jeremy joined AoPS in 2009. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2006 and was a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT from 2006 to 2009. He is currently the Online School Director at AoPS. He once specialized in turning hard problems in geometry, algebra, and mathematical physics into easy problems in combinatorics and graph theory. Now he specializes in helping to redistribute mathematics from brilliant teachers to brilliant students. He gets his signs right 50 percent of the time, struggles with problems that lack symmetry, and secretly believes that every problem somehow reduces to the Chinese Remainder Theorem.

Richard Rusczyk

Art of Problem Solving was founded by Richard Rusczyk in 2003 to create interactive educational opportunities for avid math students. Richard Rusczyk is one of the co-authors of the Art of Problem Solving classic textbooks, author of Art of Problem Solving's Introduction to Algebra, Introduction to Geometry, and Precalculus textbooks, co-author of Art of Problem Solving's Intermediate Algebra and Prealgebra, one of the co-creators of the Mandelbrot Competition, and a past Director of the USA Mathematical Talent Search. He was a participant in National MATHCOUNTS, a three-time participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program, and a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner (1989). He received the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions Paul Erdös Award in 2014. He graduated from Princeton University in 1993, and worked as a bond trader for D.E. Shaw & Company for four years. AoPS marks Richard's return to his vocation - educating motivated students.