Kevin B. Ford | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 22 December 1967 |
| Alma mater | California State University, Chico University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Known for | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of South Carolina |
| Doctoral advisor | Heini Halberstam [1] |
Kevin B. Ford (born 22 December 1967) is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory.
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]
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]
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]
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]
In 2013, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [12]
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