Joseph J. Kohn | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1932-05-18)May 18, 1932 |
| Died | September 13, 2023(2023-09-13) (aged 91) Plainsboro, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) Princeton University (PhD) |
| Known for | Kohn Laplacian Kohn–Rossi complex |
| Awards | Leroy P. Steele Prize (1979) ICM Speaker (1966) Stefan Bergman Prize (2004) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Spencer |
| Doctoral students | David Catlin John P. D'Angelo Gerald Folland Pengfei Guan Mei-Chi Shaw |
Joseph John Kohn (May 18, 1932 – September 13, 2023) was a Czech-born American academic and mathematician. He was professor of mathematics atPrinceton University, where he researched partial differential operators andcomplex analysis.
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Kohn's father wasCzech-Jewish architect Otto Kohn. AfterNazi Germany invadedCzechoslovakia, he and his family emigrated toParis andEcuador in 1939. There, Otto attendedColegio Americano de Quito.[1]
In 1945, Joseph moved to the United States, where he attendedBrooklyn Technical High School. He studied atMassachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. 1953) and atPrinceton University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1956 underDonald Spencer ("A Non-Self-Adjoint Boundary Value Problem on Pseudo-Kähler Manifolds").[2]
From 1956 to 1957, Kohn was an instructor at Princeton. In 1958, he served asassistant professor, in 1962, associate professor and in 1964, professor atBrandeis University, where he also served as Chairman of the Mathematics Department (1963–66). Since 1968, he had been a professor at Princeton University, where he served as chairman from 1993 to 1996. He was a visiting professor atHarvard (1996–97),Prague,Florence,Mexico City (National Polytechnic Institute),Stanford,Berkeley,Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy), andIHES (France).
Kohn's work focused, among other things, on the use of partial differential operators in the theory of functions of several complex variables andmicrolocal analysis. He has at least 65 doctoral descendants.
Kohn was a Sloan Fellow in 1963 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1976–77. From 1976 to 1988, he was a member of the editorial board of theAnnals of Mathematics. In 1966, he was aninvited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians inMoscow; he gave a speech on "Differential complexes".
Film directorMiloš Forman was his half-brother through their father Otto Kohn.
Kohn died in Plainsboro, New Jersey on September 13, 2023, at the age of 91.[3][4][5]
Kohn was a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1966 and a member of theNational Academy of Sciences from 1988. In 2012, he became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society (AMS).[6]
Kohn won the AMS'Steele Prize in 1979 for his paper "Harmonic integrals on strongly convex domains". In 1990, he received an Honorary Doctorate from theUniversity of Bologna.[7] In 2004, he was awarded theBolzano Prize.
