Tanya Khovanova

Mathematician, member of the USSR's 1975 International Mathematical Olympiad team, later on the research staff at MIT. Writes in first person on her own site (tanyakhovanova.com) about being recruited in 1975 by math teacher V.A. Senderov, along with her Olympiad teammates, to solve a smuggled list of Mekh-mat's "coffin problems" — deliberately hard entrance questions used to fail Jewish applicants — for use in coaching those applicants. Her team of eight solved only half the list in a month. Later co-authored "Jewish Problems" (arXiv:1110.1556) with Alexey Radul, a scholarly problem collection built on the same material.

References

• claim-khovanova-1975-olympiad-team-recruited-to-solve-smuggled-mekh-mat-coffin-problems
• claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md