Kevin B. Ford (born 22 December 1967) is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

working in

analytic number theory In mathematics, analytic number theory is a branch of number theory that uses methods from mathematical analysis to solve problems about the integers. It is often said to have begun with Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet's 1837 introduction of Dir ...

Education and career

Early life

Ford received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1990 from the

California State University, Chico California State University, Chico (Chico State) is a public university in Chico, California. It was founded in 1887 as one of about 180 "normal schools" founded by state governments in the 19th century to train teachers for the rapidly growing ...

. He then attended the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

(UIUC), where he completed his doctoral studies in 1994 under the supervision of

Heini Halberstam Heini Halberstam (11 September 1926 – 25 January 2014) was a Czech-born British mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory. He is remembered in part for the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture from 1968. Life and career Halber ...

. His dissertation was titled ''The representation of numbers as sums of unlike powers''.

Early career (1994–2001)

From September 1994 to June 1995 he was at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

. He was then a postdoc at

UT Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

until 1998, while also doing software development at the NASA

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

during the summers of 1997 and 1998. From 1998 to 2001, Ford was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Professorship (2001–present)

He has been a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the department of mathematics of UIUC since 2001. In addition, he returned to IAS from September 2009 to June 2010, was a research member at the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Califor ...

in 2017, and was a visiting fellow at

Magdalen College, Oxford Magdalen College ( ) is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford. It was founded in 1458 by Bishop of Winchester William of Waynflete. It is one of the wealthiest Oxford colleges, as of 2022, and ...

in 2019. As of 2025, Ford has supervised 8 PhD students, all at UIUC.

Research

Ford's early work focused on the distribution of

Euler's totient function In number theory, Euler's totient function counts the positive integers up to a given integer that are relatively prime to . It is written using the Greek letter phi as \varphi(n) or \phi(n), and may also be called Euler's phi function. In ot ...

. 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

10^

. In 1999, he settled Sierpinski’s conjecture on

. In August 2014, Kevin Ford, in collaboration with

Green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a com ...

, Konyagin and

Tao The Tao or Dao is the natural way of the universe, primarily as conceived in East Asian philosophy and religion. This seeing of life cannot be grasped as a concept. Rather, it is seen through actual living experience of one's everyday being. T ...

, resolved a longstanding conjecture of

Erdős Erdős, Erdos, or Erdoes is a Hungarian surname. Paul Erdős (1913–1996), Hungarian mathematician Other people with the surname * Ágnes Erdős (1950–2021), Hungarian politician * Brad Erdos (born 1990), Canadian football player * Éva Erd� ...

on large gaps between primes, also proven independently by James Maynard. The five mathematicians were awarded for their work the largest Erdős prize ($10,000) ever offered. In 2017, they improved their results in a joint paper. He is one of the namesakes of the Erdős–Tenenbaum–Ford constant, named for his work using it in estimating the number of small integers that have divisors in a given interval.

Recognition

In 2013, 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 2017-11-03.

References

20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1967 births Living people American number theorists University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society {{mathematician-stub