Jeffry Ned Kahn is a professor of mathematics at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

notable for his work in

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

Education

Kahn received his Ph.D. from

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

in 1979 after completing his dissertation under his advisor Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri.

Research

In 1980 he showed the importance of the

bundle theorem In Euclidean geometry, the bundle theorem is a statement about six circles and eight points in the Euclidean plane. In general incidence geometry, it is a similar property that a Möbius plane may or may not satisfy. According to Kahn's Theorem, it ...

for ovoidal

Möbius plane In mathematics, a Möbius plane (named after August Ferdinand Möbius) is one of the Benz planes: Möbius plane, Laguerre plane and Minkowski plane. The classical example is based on the geometry of lines and circles in the real affine plane. A sec ...

s. In 1993, together with

Gil Kalai Gil Kalai (born 1955) is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Professor of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and adjunct Professor of mathematics a ...

, he disproved

Borsuk's conjecture The Borsuk problem in geometry, for historical reasons incorrectly called Borsuk's conjecture, is a question in discrete geometry. It is named after Karol Borsuk. Problem In 1932, Karol Borsuk showed that an ordinary 3-dimensional ball in Eucl ...

. In 1996 he was awarded the

Pólya Prize (SIAM) Pólya Prize may refer to: *George Pólya Prize, awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) *Pólya Prize (LMS), awarded by the London Mathematical Society See also * George Pólya Award The George Pólya Award is pres ...

Awards and honors

He was an invited speaker at the 1994

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Zurich. In 2012, he was awarded the

Fulkerson Prize The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at e ...

(jointly with Anders Johansson and Van H. Vu) for determining the threshold of edge density above which a

random graph In mathematics, random graph is the general term to refer to probability distributions over graphs. Random graphs may be described simply by a probability distribution, or by a random process which generates them. The theory of random graphs li ...

can be covered by disjoint copies of a given smaller graph. Also in 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-27.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kahn, Jeff Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Combinatorialists Rutgers University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Year of birth missing (living people)