Misha Lavrov

About me

Hi! I'm Misha. I do research in combinatorics and teach math, occasionally to high-school students.

You may occasionally also see my name written as Mikhail Lavrov. This is still me. Mikhail and I are the same person.

There are many ways to reach me, but sending an email to misha.p.l@gmail.com is one of the most reliable.

Research

What is my research about? That's a good question, and rather than answer it, I will reward you for asking it with a link to several questions of my own.

Where have I been doing it? Well, until my recent move to Connecticut, I was an assistant professor of mathematics at Kennesaw State University. From 2017 to 2020, I was a J.L. Doob postdoc in the Math Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I received my Ph.D. from the ACO (Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization) program at Carnegie Mellon University, in May 2017. My Ph.D. advisor was Po-Shen Loh.

You may be interested in:

• A list of my publications
• My CV (last updated February 2025)

Teaching

I've done a lot of teaching here and there in the past, including:

• At Kennesaw State University, from 2020 to 2025.
• At the University of Illinois, from 2017 to 2020.
• At Canada/USA Mathcamp! I was first a mentor there in 2014, and have returned every summer so far.
• For the Western PA Math Circle and ARML team. This is a weekly math program for middle- and high-school students in the Pittsburgh area; I was its head coach for most of my time as a grad student.

I've written detailed lecture notes for several of my classes at KSU and UIUC, which are archived on this website:

• Nonlinear Programming (UIUC, Spring 2019)
• Linear Programming (UIUC, Spring-2020)
• Linear Programming (KSU, Fall 2022)
• Calculus IV (KSU, Fall 2024)
• Graph theory (KSU, Fall 2024)

Games and Puzzles

This website also contains several game-like puzzles and puzzle-like games that I've made in JavaScript:

• Word Lie is a Wordle clone with a twist: the game is allowed to lie to you once. (Read the "About" page for more details about when and how it decides to lie.)
• Help Wanted is a Stardew Valley-themed puzzle I wrote for Mathcamp. (Figuring out what to do is part of the puzzle, and the answer is a single word or short phrase.)
• Tactic Tea is a game almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Tic-Tac-Toe. It is inspired by a research problem I was working on.

Other things

When I want to do a little bit of math, but not too much math, I answer questions on Math StackExchange (and occasionally ask them, too). I have a list of some of my favorite questions there.

I have a page giving examples of Greco-Latin squares of all possible sizes up to 24-by-24. After that point, by a certain narrow and unpopular reading of the definition, there are no more Greco-Latin squares, because the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters.