Kevin Ford (mathematician)
American mathematician (born 1967)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kevin B. Ford (born 22 December 1967) is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory.
- Carmichael's totient function conjecture
- Sierpinski's conjecture
- Work on prime gaps
Kevin B. Ford | |
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| Born | 22 December 1967 |
| Alma mater | California State University, Chico University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of South Carolina |
| Heini Halberstam[1] | |
Education and career
Early life
Ford received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1990 from the California State University, Chico.[2] He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he completed his doctoral studies in 1994 under the supervision of Heini Halberstam.[2][1] His dissertation was titled The representation of numbers as sums of unlike powers.[1]
Early career (1994–2001)
From September 1994 to June 1995 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.[2][3] He was then a postdoc at UT Austin until 1998, while also doing software development at the NASA Ames Research Center during the summers of 1997 and 1998.[2] From 1998 to 2001, Ford was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.[2]
Professorship (2001–present)
He has been a professor in the department of mathematics of UIUC since 2001.[2] In addition, he returned to IAS from September 2009 to June 2010,[2][3] was a research member at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 2017,[2] and was a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2019.[2]
As of 2025, Ford has supervised eight PhD students, all at UIUC.[1]
Research
Ford's early work focused on the distribution of Euler's totient function. In 1998, he published a paper that studied in detail the range of this function and established that Carmichael's totient function conjecture is true for all integers up to .[4] In 1999, he settled Sierpinski’s conjecture on Euler's totient function.[5]
In August 2014, Kevin Ford, in collaboration with Green, Konyagin and Tao,[6] resolved a longstanding conjecture of Erdős on large gaps between primes, also proven independently by James Maynard.[7] The five mathematicians were awarded for their work the largest Erdős prize ($10,000) ever offered. [8] In 2017, they improved their results in a joint paper. [9]
He is one of the namesakes of the Erdős–Tenenbaum–Ford constant,[10] named for his work using it in estimating the number of small integers that have divisors in a given interval.[11]
Recognition
In 2013, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[12]
