Today, we have an interview with a person that has been working with IT for a long, long time. Tatyana Petrushina, who is currently working as a syste

40 Years in Computer Science: Interview with Tatyana Petrushina

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2021-06-22 10:30:06

Today, we have an interview with a person that has been working with IT for a long, long time. Tatyana Petrushina, who is currently working as a systems analyst at Provectus, has seen the birth of the field of computer science in Russia and has worked extensively at both academia and industry.

In this interview, we talk about the history of computer science, computer science education, and her current work at Provectus.

Instead of that, I’ll tell you about myself. I graduated from school with a golden medal, being the winner of several olympiads in math, physics, and chemistry. I wanted to study exact sciences and attended Odessa I.I. Mechnikov National University, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Information Technologies.

At that time, the university had a powerful research sector, with university teachers that did solid scientific research together with scientists from large research centers from all Soviet Union. And students were actively involved in these works. So from the 3rd year, I got into the field of computer development and decided to connect my career with computer science.

My first research lead, Dmitry Alekseevich Ostroukhov, was at that time doing research in computability and computational complexity theory. Fun fact: while he was on a scientific internship in Holland (the largest European mathematical computing center at that time), he was working on a problem of automatic theorem proving,and was faced with a lack of computing resources to solve it.