Henry Cohn
American mathematician
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Henry Cohn is an American mathematician. He is currently a professor at MIT.[2] Cohn graduated from Harvard University in 2000 with a doctorate in mathematics.[3] Cohn was an Erdős Lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008. In 2016, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to discrete mathematics, including applications to computer science and physics."[4]
- Microsoft Research
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Henry Cohn | |
|---|---|
Henry Cohn at Oberwolfach, June 2014 Photo by Ivonne Vetter | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Known for | Sphere packing |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
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| Thesis | New Bounds on Sphere Packings (2000) |
| Doctoral advisor | Noam Elkies[1] |
| Website | https://cohn.mit.edu/ |
In 2018, he was awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize for his article “A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing,” published in 2017[5] in the Notices of the AMS.[6]
Research
In 2003, with Chris Umans, Cohn initiated a group-theoretic approach to matrix multiplication,[7] and is a core contributor to its continued development with various coauthors.[8][9][10][11][12]
In 2004, Cohn and Noam Elkies used linear programming methods to prove[13] upper bounds on sphere packings in all dimensions. Their conjecture 8.1 suggested "magic" optimizing functions existed in dimensions 2, 8, and 24.
In March 2016 Maryna Viazovska published[14] an arXiv preprint with such a magic function - a weakly holomorphic quasimodular form - proving the optimality of the E8 lattice packing. Cohn contacted Viazovska, and within a week, Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Viazovska had similarly solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions via the Leech lattice Λ24.[15][16]
