Ken Ono

Headshot of Ken Ono

Born|  (1968-03-20) March 20, 1968 (age 58)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US

Alma mater| University of Chicago (BA, MA)
University of California, Los Angeles (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields| Mathematics
Institutions| University of Virginia[1]
Emory University
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Pennsylvania State University
Doctoral advisor| Basil Gordon
Doctoral students| Robert Schneider
Other notable students| Daniel Kane
Kate Douglass
Website| uva.theopenscholar.com/ken-ono

Ken Ono (born March 20, 1968) is an American mathematician with fields of study in number theory. Formerly the STEM Advisor to the Provost and the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, he now works in artificial intelligence at Axiom Math in Palo Alto, California.

## Contents

* 1 Early life and education
* 2 Career
* 3 Research
* 4 Media
* 5 Personal life
* 6 Honors and awards
* 7 Editorial boards
* 8 See also
* 9 References
* 10 External links

## Early life and education

Ono was born on March 20, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[2] He is the son of mathematician Takashi Ono, who emigrated from Japan to the United States after World War II. Ono was born in the United States as his father returned to the United States from the University of British Columbia in Canada for a position at the University of Pennsylvania.[3]

In the 1980s, Ono attended Towson High School, but 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.[4]

He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1989, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity.[2] He earned his PhD in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where his advisor was Basil Gordon.[5][2] Initially, he planned to study medicine, but later switched to mathematics. He attributes his interest in mathematics to his father.[6]

He is brother to Santa Ono.

## Career

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 Urbana-Champaign from 1994 to 1995.[2] He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1995 to 1997.[2]

Ono worked at Pennsylvania State University from 1997 to 2000 as an assistant professor and then as the Louis A. Martarano Professor of Mathematics.[2] 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.[2] He was the Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University from 2010 to 2019.[2] In 2019, Ono became the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, where he was named the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics and the chair of the Department of Mathematics in fall 2021.[7][2] He ended his term as chair in Fall 2022 to become the STEM Advisor to the Provost at the University of Virginia.[2]

Ono was the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2018 to 2021.[2] He is serving as the section chair for mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 2020 to 2023.[2]

In 2025 he left academia to become "Founding Mathematician" of Axiom Math in Palo Alto, California[8] to research the application of artificial intelligence to fundamental mathematics.[9]

## Research

In 2000, Ono derived a theory of Ramanujan's congruences for the partition function with all prime moduli greater than 3. His paper was published in the Annals of Mathematics.[10] In a joint work with Jan Bruinier, Ono discovered a finite algebraic formula for computing partition numbers.[11]

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.[12] 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.[13]

In a 2015 joint paper co-authored with John Duncan and Michael Griffin, Ono helped prove the umbral moonshine conjecture.[14] 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.[14]

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.[15] 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.[16]

In 2024, he published (co-authored with William Craig and Jan-Willem van Ittersum) a paper which proves a new, unexpected way to identify prime numbers using the properties of integer partitions. In 2025 he was nominated for the Cozzarelli Prize.[17][18]

Beginning in 2016, Ono has used mathematical analysis and modeling to advise elite competitive swimmers, including participants in the 2020 and 2024 Olympics.[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]

File:Ken Ono Washington 2009.jpgKen Ono in 2009 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.

## Media

Ono wrote, with Amir Aczel as coauthor, an autobiography, emphasizing the inspiration he gained from Ramanujan's mathematical research.[26][27]

Ono 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.[6]

He starred in a 2022 Super Bowl commercial for Miller Lite beer.[28] He is on the Board of Directors of the Infinity Arts Foundation.[29]

## Personal life

From 2012 to 2014, Ono has competed in World Triathlon Cross Championships events, representing the United States.[30]

## Honors and awards

* National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1999)[31]
* Sloan Research Fellowship (1999)[32]
* Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1999)[33]
* Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bill Clinton (2000)[34]
* Guggenheim Fellowship (2003)[35]
* National Science Foundation Director's Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award (2005)[36]
* Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013)[37]
* University of Chicago Alumni Award for Professional Achievement (2023)[38]
* Effie Silver Award for Miller 64 Super Bowl ad (2023).[39]
* Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2024).[40]
* Fellow of the Asian American Scholar Forum (2024).[41]

## Editorial boards

Ono is on the editorial board of several journals:[2]

* Annals of Combinatorics
* Communications in Number Theory and Physics
* The Ramanujan Journal (Editor-in-Chief)
* Research in the Mathematical Sciences (Editor-in-Chief)
* Research in Number Theory (Editor-in-Chief)

## See also

* Ramanujan's ternary quadratic form

## References

1. ↑ Fall 2019, Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/ken-ono/
2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 "Vitae". https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/ken-ono/files/vitaeshort.pdf. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
3. ↑ Bach, John (April 2013), "Getting to know Ono", UC Magazine, http://magazine.uc.edu/issues/0413/ono.html, retrieved 2015-01-16
4. ↑ Archives, Cycling (2019-06-26). "Ken Ono". http://www.cyclingarchives.com/coureurfiche.php?coureurid=28885.
5. ↑ Ken Ono at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Saikia, Manjil (23 February 2015). "In conversation with Prof. Ken Ono: Gonit Sora". http://gonitsora.com/in-conversation-with-prof-ken-ono/.
7. ↑ Bahorsky, Russ (2022-01-05). "Faculty Spotlight: Math Professor Is UVA Swimming's Secret Weapon". https://news.virginia.edu/content/faculty-spotlight-math-professor-uva-swimmings-secret-weapon.
8. ↑ Shrivastava, Rashi. "Former Meta Researchers Are Building An AI Math Whiz". https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2025/09/30/meet-the-stanford-dropout-building-an-ai-to-solve-maths-hardest-problems-and-create-harder-ones/.
9. ↑ Ben Cohen (Dec 4, 2025). "Exclusive | The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia—for an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old". https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-startup-649bc417.
10. ↑ Peterson, Ivars (13 December 2002). "Power in partitions". https://www.sciencenews.org/article/power-partitions.
11. ↑ Kavassalis, Sarah. "Finite formula found for partition numbers". The Language of Bad Physics. http://blogs.plos.org/badphysics/2011/01/20/ono/.
12. ↑ Griffin, Michael J.; Ono, Ken; Warnaar, S. Ole (2014). "A framework of Rogers–Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties". Duke Mathematical Journal 165 (8). doi:10.1215/00127094-3449994.
13. ↑ "Mother lode of mathematical identities discovered, Discover". http://discovermagazine.com/2015/jan-feb/15-a-beautiful-find.
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Duncan, John; Griffin, Michael J.; Ono, Ken (2015). "Proof of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture". Research in the Mathematical Sciences 2. doi:10.1186/s40687-015-0044-7.
15. ↑ Griffin, Michael J.; Ono, Ken; Rolen, Larry; Zagier, Don (2019). "Jensen polynomials for the Riemann zeta function and other sequences". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 116 (23): 11103–11110. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902572116. PMID 31113886. Bibcode: 2019PNAS..11611103G.
16. ↑ Bombieri, Enrico (2019). "New progress on the zeta function: From old conjectures to a major breakthrough". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 116 (23): 11085–11086. doi:10.1073/pnas.1906804116. PMID 31123152. Bibcode: 2019PNAS..11611085B.
17. ↑ Rachel Crowell. "Mathematicians Come Up with ‘Mind-Blowing’ Method for Defining Prime Numbers". https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-hunting-prime-numbers-discover-infinite-new-pattern-for/.
18. ↑ "Ken Ono Honored as Cozzarelli Award Finalist for Groundbreaking Work on Prime Numbers". https://datascience.virginia.edu/news/ken-ono-honored-cozzarelli-award-finalist-groundbreaking-work-prime-numbers.
19. ↑ "- Emory news, 11 January 2018". https://news.emory.edu/stories/2018/01/er_ono_swim_study/campus.html.
20. ↑ Sugiura, Ken. "- Atlanta Journal Constitution, 25 June 2021". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. https://www.ajc.com/sports/emory-grad-andrew-wilsons-spot-on-us-olympic-team-is-mind-blowing/FFNLH3K3INAJZF5P5OBZ6EONPE/.
21. ↑ "- University of Virginia news, 5 January 2022". 5 January 2022. https://news.virginia.edu/content/faculty-spotlight-math-professor-uva-swimmings-secret-weapon.
22. ↑ "- National Public Radio, 12 March 2022". https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1085542427/uva-professor-swimmer-math-faster.
23. ↑ Hodges, Coleman (Aug 9, 2022). "Practice + Pancakes: UVA Mathematician Ken Ono Brings His Analytics to Swimming". https://swimswam.com/practice-pancakes-uva-mathematician-ken-ono-brings-his-analytics-to-swimming/.
24. ↑ Douglass K, Lamb A, Lu J, Ono K, Tenpas W, (March 2024). "Swimming in Data" \- Mathematical Intelligencer, 24 March 2024 , doi:10.1007/s00283-024-10339-0.
25. ↑ Jordana Cepelewicz, How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold, Quanta Magazine, June 2024. Subtitle: "Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently".
26. ↑ Ono, Ken; Aczel, Amir D. (20 April 2016). My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-25568-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=JZkFDAAAQBAJ. Retrieved 28 March 2024.
27. ↑ Stenger, Allen (July 7, 2016). "review of My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count by Ken Ono and Amir Aczel". https://maa.org/press/maa-reviews/my-search-for-ramanujan-how-i-learned-to-count.
28. ↑ "Miller 64 reacts to Bud Light's new 80-calorie beer in new ad". 8 February 2022. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/miller64-poses-a-pressing-math-problem-which-number-is-smaller-80-or-64/.
29. ↑ "Infinity Arts Foundation". 29 May 2022. https://www.infinityartsfoundation.org/.
30. ↑ "Athlete Profile:Ken Ono". https://wtcs.triathlon.org/athletes/profile/58260/ken_ono. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
31. ↑ Date, Upcoming Due (2024-03-30). "The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers: Recipient Details". https://www.nsf.gov/awards/PECASE/recip_details.jsp;jsessionid=26A9B0B160E86C0FD7308D7C3164AB48?pecase_id=75.
32. ↑ \- IAS biography . retrieved 2022-05-29.
33. ↑ David and Lucile Packard Foundation website , retrieved 2022-05-29.
34. ↑ \- Penn State news , retrieved 2022-05-29.
35. ↑ \- John S. Guggenheim Foundation website , retrieved 2022-05-29.
36. ↑ \- NSF press release , retrieved 2022-05-29.
37. ↑ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society , retrieved 2013-03-20.
38. ↑ University of Chicago news story , retrieved 2023-03-13.
39. ↑ "2023 Effie Award announcement". 6 July 2023. https://www.effie.org/legacycases/case/US_2023_E-7994-853.
40. ↑ Indian Academy of Sciences Announcement , retrieved 2024-01-10.
41. ↑ Asian American Scholar Forum website, retrieved 2024-08-23.

## External links

* Ken Ono's IMDB.com page
* Spirit of Ramanujan website
* Ken Ono on The Man Who Knew Infinity and why Ramanujan Matters
* Ono, Ken; Aczel, Amir D. (2016-04-13). My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count. Springer. ISBN 978-3319255668.

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