Mikhail Khovanov

Mikhail Khovanov (Russian: Михаил Хованов; born 1972) is a Russian-American professor of mathematics at Columbia University. He graduated from Moscow State School 57 mathematical class in 1988. He earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1997, where he studied under Igor Frenkel. His interests include knot theory and algebraic topology. He is known for the Khovanov homology for links, introduced in his paper "A categorification of the Jones polynomial", which he published while at UC Davis. This was one of the first examples of categorification and is quoted in knot theory.