Ken Ono

Ken Ono (born March 20, 1968) is an American mathematician who specializes in number theory, especially in integer partitions, modular forms, umbral Moonshine, the Riemann Hypothesis and the fields of interest to Srinivasa Ramanujan.

He is the STEM Advisor to the Provost and the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia.

Ono was born on March 20, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He is the son of mathematician Takashi Ono, who emigrated from Japan to the United States after World War II.

His older brother, immunologist and university president Santa J. Ono, was born while Takashi Ono was in Canada working at the University of British Columbia, but by the time Ken Ono was born the family had returned to the US for a position at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1980s, Ono attended Towson High School, but he dropped out.

He later enrolled at the University of Chicago without a high school diploma.

There he raced bicycles, and he was a member of the Pepsi–Miyata Cycling Team.

He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1989, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity.

Ono worked as an instructor at Woodbury University from 1991 to 1993, as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Georgia from 1993 to 1994, and as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1994 to 1995.

He earned his PhD in 1993 at UCLA where his advisor was Basil Gordon.

Initially he planned to study medicine, but later switched to mathematics.

He attributes his interest in mathematics to his father.

He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1995 to 1997.

Ono worked at Pennsylvania State University from 1997 to 2000 as an assistant professor and then as the Louis A. Martarano Professor of Mathematics.

He moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an associate professor in 1999, and later became the Solle P. and Margaret Manasse Professor of Letters and Science from 2004 to 2011 and as the Hilldale Professor of Mathematics from 2008 to 2011.

In 2000, Ono derived a theory of Ramanujan congruences for the partition function with all prime moduli greater than 3.

His paper was published in the Annals of Mathematics.

In a joint work with Jan Bruinier, Ono discovered a finite algebraic formula for computing partition numbers.

He was the Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University from 2010 to 2019.

From 2012 to 2014, Ono has competed in World Triathlon Cross Championships events while representing the United States.

Ono is on the editorial board of several journals:

In 2014, a joint paper by Michael J. Griffin, Ono, and S. Ole Warnaar provided a framework for the Rogers–Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties, solving a long-standing mystery stemming from the work of Ramanujan.

The findings yield new formulas for algebraic numbers.

Their work was ranked 15th among the top 100 stories of 2014 in science by Discover magazine.

In a joint paper co-authored with John Duncan and Michael Griffin, Ono helped prove the umbral Moonshine conjecture.

This conjecture was formulated by Miranda Cheng, John Duncan, and Jeff Harvey, and is a generalization of the monstrous Moonshine conjecture proved by Richard Borcherds.

Since 2016, Ono has been using mathematical analysis and modeling to advise elite competitive swimmers including 2020 Tokyo Olympic medalists Kate Douglass, Cate DeLoof, Paige Madden, Alex Walsh, Emma Weyant and Andrew Wilson.

He was an Associate Producer and the mathematical consultant for the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity, which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, based on Ramanujan's biography written by Robert Kanigel.

He starred in a 2022 Super Bowl commercial for Miller Lite beer.

He is on the Board of Directors of the Infinity Arts Foundation.

Ono was the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2018 to 2021.

In 2019, Ono became the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, and in Fall 2021 he was named the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics and the chairman of the Department of Mathematics.

He ended his term as chairman in Fall 2022 to become the STEM Advisor to the Provost at the University of Virginia.

In May 2019, Ono published a joint paper (co-authored with Don Zagier and two former students) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the Riemann Hypothesis.

Their work proves a large portion of the Jensen-Polya criterion for the Riemann Hypothesis.

However, the Riemann Hypothesis remains unsolved.

Their work also establishes the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble random matrix condition in derivative aspect for the derivatives of the Riemann Xi function.

He is serving as the section chair for mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 2020 to 2023.