Jeffry Ned Kahn is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University 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 in 1979 after completing his dissertation under his advisor

Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri Dwijendra Kumar Ray-Chaudhuri (born November 1, 1933) is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He and his student R. M. Wilson together solved Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968 which contributed to developments in combinatorial design, ...

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 planes. In 1993, together with Gil Kalai, 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).

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 (jointly with Anders Johansson and

Van H. Vu Van H. Vu ( vi, Vũ Hà Văn) is a Vietnamese mathematician, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.CV

) for determining the threshold of edge density above which a random graph can be covered by disjoint copies of a given smaller graph. Also in 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.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)