Joseph J. Kohn

Joseph John Kohn ( born May 18, 1932 in Prague) is an American mathematician who deals with partial differential equations and function theory of several complex variables.

Life and work

Kohn emigrated with his family to Ecuador in 1939 and 1945 in the United States, where he went to Brooklyn Tech High School. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Bachelor 1953) and at Princeton University (Master 1954), where he received his doctorate in 1956 with Donald Spencer ( " A Non- Self- Adjoint Boundary Value Problem on pseudo - Kähler manifolds "). After that, he was in 1957/58 at the Institute for Advanced Study ( and also 1961/62, 1976/7, 1988/89 ). 1956/57, he was instructor at Princeton. In 1958 he was Assistant Professor, in 1962 Associate Professor and in 1964 Professor at Brandeis University, where he was from 1963 to 1966 chairman of the mathematics department.

Since 1968 he is a professor at Princeton University, where he was Chairman of the Faculty 1993-96.

He was, inter alia, Visiting Professor at Harvard University (1996 /7), in Prague, Florence, Mexico City ( Centro de Estudios del IPN), at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Rome, Buenos Aires and at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques ( IHES ).

He worked among others also on the application of partial differential equations in the theory of functions of several complex variables and micro- local analysis. With Louis Nirenberg he led in 1965 pseudodifferential operators a ..

Kohn was 1963 Sloan Fellow and 1976/77 Guggenheim Fellow. Since 1966 he is member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1988 and of the National Academy of Sciences. 1976 to 1988 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematics. In 1979 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize ( for " Harmonic integrals on 'strongly convex domains 1.2 ", Annals of Mathematics Bd.78, 1963, p.112, Bd.79, 1964, S.450 ), 2004 Bergman prize and in 1990 the Bolzano prize. In 1990 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Bologna. He was 1966 Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow ( " differential complexes" ) and in Stockholm in 1962 (Harmonic integrals on non compact manifolds complex ).