Yulia Zdanovska
May 4, 2000 - March 7, 2022
Kharkiv, Ukraine
Mathematician and educator Yulia Zdanovska died on March 7, 2022, at the age of 21, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, during the shelling of that city of 1.4 million, a major cultural center.
Born in Kharkiv, Zdanovska attended the Ukrainian Physics and Mathematics Lyceum in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, a science magnet high school affiliated with Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (KNU). She was active in competitions in mathematics and programming. She was a silver medalist at the 2017 European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad where the Ukrainian team scored second (after the US and before Russia, Hungary, Serbia, Israel, and 38 other countries). (See the results on this page; roll down to "Country results.")
Subsequently she attended KNU and graduated in 2021 with a degree in "Computer Mathematics." After graduation she joined the Teach for Ukraine program (analogous to "Teach for America" in the US) and decided to teach mathematics and computer science in the village of Yuriivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
In this article (in Ukrainian) she describes her goals. "I want to help ... so that children are not afraid of this subject..." "When I took part in the Olympiads, there was an unspoken list of [schools] which regularly [sent] participants - mostly mathematical lyceums or schools of regional centers. If someone comes from the countryside, it's always great news. However, this was quite rare. I don't promise that my students will immediately reach the national level. But their participation in regional competitions would also be a breakthrough."
"I have never been in another reality. I always studied either in Kharkiv or in Kyiv. I am interested in seeing how a school in a village differs from the environment of a big city or a specialized lyceum where I studied. I want to promote change at the global level, to be involved in the reform of education in Ukraine. Education in small towns should be no worse than education in large cities."
Her concluding comment: "I think the reason so many people apply for the program `Teach for Ukraine' is that it ... helps bring like-minded people together."
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The news of Zdanovska's death and the report that it was caused by the shelling of Kharkiv came from her close friends via my student Bohdan Kivva, himself a close friend of Zdanovska's friends. Bohdan himself graduated from KNU in 2016. This report has also been confirmed from multiple sources, including
- the Facebook page of her teacher, Prof. Georgiy Shevchenko, a mathematician working in probability theory and statistics, who holds a dual position at KNU and the Kyiv School of Economics, where he is the academic director,
- the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, and
- the respectable publication education.24tv.ua (in Russian).
Some sources, including death-obituary.com, report that she was distributing aid when the rockets hit.
[Posted on March 9, 2022]
[Added on July 7, 2022]
Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska received the Fields medal on July 5, 2022. At the award ceremony in Helsinki, she paid tribute to Yulia Zdanovska.
“Yulia was a person filled with light and her big dream was teaching mathematics to kids in Ukraine,” Viazovska said, according to phys.org.
A free online math enrichment and research program for exceptional high school students from Ukraine, called Yulia's Dream, was started in Zdanovska's memory at the MIT Math Department.