Henry Cohn

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Henry Cohn
Henry Cohn.jpg
Henry Cohn at Oberwolfach, June 2014
Photo by Ivonne Vetter
Alma mater MIT [1]
Harvard
Known for Sphere packing
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Institutions Microsoft Research
Thesis New Bounds on Sphere Packings (2000)
Doctoral advisor Noam Elkies [2]
Website https://cohn.mit.edu/

Henry Cohn is an American mathematician. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at MIT. [1] In collaboration with Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Maryna Viazovska, he solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions. [3] In 2003, with Chris Umans he initiated a group-theoretic approach to matrix multiplication, [4] and is a core contributor to its continued development with various coauthors. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Cohn graduated from Harvard University in 2000 with a doctorate in mathematics. [10] 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." [11]

In 2018, he was awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize for his article “A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing,” published in 2017 in the Notices of the AMS . [12]

Related Research Articles

In computational complexity theory, EXPSPACE is the set of all decision problems solvable by a deterministic Turing machine in exponential space, i.e., in space, where is a polynomial function of . Some authors restrict to be a linear function, but most authors instead call the resulting class ESPACE. If we use a nondeterministic machine instead, we get the class NEXPSPACE, which is equal to EXPSPACE by Savitch's theorem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matrix multiplication</span> Mathematical operation in linear algebra

In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the second matrix. The resulting matrix, known as the matrix product, has the number of rows of the first and the number of columns of the second matrix. The product of matrices A and B is denoted as AB.

The Kepler conjecture, named after the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, is a mathematical theorem about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling space has a greater average density than that of the cubic close packing and hexagonal close packing arrangements. The density of these arrangements is around 74.05%.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sphere packing</span> An arrangement of non-overlapping spheres within a containing space

In geometry, a sphere packing is an arrangement of non-overlapping spheres within a containing space. The spheres considered are usually all of identical size, and the space is usually three-dimensional Euclidean space. However, sphere packing problems can be generalised to consider unequal spheres, spaces of other dimensions or to non-Euclidean spaces such as hyperbolic space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell Impagliazzo</span> American computer scientist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computational complexity of mathematical operations</span> Algorithmic runtime requirements for common math procedures

The following tables list the computational complexity of various algorithms for common mathematical operations.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ran Raz</span>

Ran Raz is a computer scientist who works in the area of computational complexity theory. He was a professor in the faculty of mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute. He is now a professor of computer science at Princeton University.

In theoretical computer science, the computational complexity of matrix multiplication dictates how quickly the operation of matrix multiplication can be performed. Matrix multiplication algorithms are a central subroutine in theoretical and numerical algorithms for numerical linear algebra and optimization, so finding the fastest algorithm for matrix multiplication is of major practical relevance.

Christopher Umans is a professor of Computer Science in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on algorithms, computational complexity, algebraic complexity, and hardness of approximation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amit Sahai</span> American cryptographer (born 1974)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maryna Viazovska</span> Ukrainian mathematician (born 1984)

Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cap set</span> Points with no three in a line

In affine geometry, a cap set is a subset of where no three elements sum to the zero vector. The cap set problem is the problem of finding the size of the largest possible cap set, as a function of . The first few cap set sizes are 1, 2, 4, 9, 20, 45, 112, ....

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia Vassilevska Williams</span> Theoretical computer scientist

Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.

Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

In mathematics, a dijoin is a subset of the edges of a directed graph, with the property that contracting every edge in the dijoin produces a strongly connected graph. Equivalently, a dijoin is a subset of the edges that, for every dicut, includes at least one edge crossing the dicut. Here, a dicut is a partition of the vertices into two subsets, so that each edge that has an endpoint in both subsets is directed from the first subset to the second.

Tali Kaufman is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist whose research topics have included property testing, expander graphs, coding theory, and randomized algorithms with sublinear time complexity. She is a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, and a fellow of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

References

  1. 1 2 "Henry Cohn" . Retrieved 14 July 2017.
  2. Henry Cohn at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Klarreich, Erica (30 March 2016). "Sphere Packing Solved in Higher Dimensions". Quanta Magazine . Retrieved 14 July 2017.
  4. Cohn, Henry; Umans, Christopher (2003). "A group-theoretic approach to fast matrix multiplication". Proc. 44th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). IEEE. pp. 438–449. doi:10.1109/SFCS.2003.1238217.
  5. Cohn, Henry; Kleinberg, Robert; Szegedy, Balász; Umans, Christopher (2005). "Group-theoretic Algorithms for Matrix Multiplication". Proc. 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). IEEE. pp. 379–388. doi:10.1109/SFCS.2005.39.
  6. Cohn, Henry; Umans, Christopher (2013). "Fast matrix multiplication using coherent configurations". Proc. 24th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA). SIAM. pp. 1074–1087. doi:10.1137/1.9781611973105.77.
  7. Blasiak, Jonah; Church, Thomas; Cohn, Henry; Grochow, Joshua A.; Naslund, Eric; Sawin, William F.; Umans, Christopher (2017). "On cap sets and the group-theoretic approach to matrix multiplication". Discrete Analysis. doi:10.19086/da.1245.
  8. Blasiak, Jonah; Church, Thomas; Cohn, Henry; Grochow, Joshua A.; Umans, Christopher (2017). "Which groups are amenable to proving exponent two for matrix multiplication?". arXiv: 1712.02302 [math.GR].
  9. Blasiak, Jonah; Cohn, Henry; Grochow, Joshua A.; Pratt, Kevin; Umans, Christopher (2023). "Matrix Multiplication via Matrix Groups". 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023). Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. pp. 19:1-19:16. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.19.
  10. "Henry Cohn | MIT Mathematics". Archived from the original on 2022-02-19. Retrieved 2017-12-22.
  11. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2017-08-09
  12. "2018 Levi L. Conant Prize" (PDF). American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 7 September 2018.