Joseph J. Kohn

Joseph J. Kohn (born May 18, 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, where he does research on partial differential operators and function theory.

Life and work

He emigrated with his family to Ecuador in 1939, and to the United States in 1945, where he attended the Brooklyn Tech Highschool. He studied at MIT (bachelor 1953) and at Princeton University (master 1954), where he obtained his PhD in 1956 under Donald Spencer ("A Non-Self-Adjoint Boundary Value Problem on Pseudo-Kähler Manifolds"). Later he was at the Institute for Advanced Study during 1957/58 (and again 1961/62, 1976/7, 1988/89). In 1956/57, he was an Instructor in Princeton. In 1958, he was Assistant Professor, in 1962 Associate Professor and in 1964 Professor at Brandeis University, where he also served as Chairman of the Mathematics Department (1963-1966). Since 1968, he is a Professor at Princeton University, where he served as Chairman in 1993-96. He was a visiting professor in Harvard (1996/7), Prague, Florence, Mexico City (Centro de Estudios del IPN), Stanford, Berkeley, Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Rome, Buenos Aires, and at IHES.

His work focuses, among other things, on the use of partial differential operators in the theory of functions of several complex variables and microlocal analysis.

Kohn was a Sloan Fellow in 1963 and a Guggenheim Fellow on 1976/77. Since 1966 he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and since 1988 a member of the National Academy of Sciences. From 1976 to 1988, he was a member of the editorial board of the Annals of Mathematics. In Kohn war 1963 Sloan Fellow und 1976/77 Guggenheim Fellow.

In 1966 he was an invited speaker at the International Mathematics Congress in Moscow ("Differential complexes"). He won the AMS Steele Prize in 1979 for his paper "Harmonic integrals on strongly convex domains". In 1998 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bologna. In 2004, he was awarded the Bolzano Prize.

He has had at least 65 doctoral descendants.

Literature

*Bloom, Catlin, D´Angelo, Siu (Herausgeber) "Modern methods in complex analysis. Papers from the conference honoring Robert Gunning and Joseph Kohn on the occasion of their 60th birthdays held at Princeton University 1992", Princeton University Press 1995

External links

*MathGenealogy|id=18853
* [http://www.math.princeton.edu/CV/KohnCV.pdf Curriculum Vitae of Joseph J. Kohn]
* [http://www.ams.org/prizes/steele-prize.html Leroy P. Steele prizes]