Kevin Ford

Kevin B. Ford (born 22 December 1967) is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory.

Education and career

Early life Ford received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1990 from the California State University, Chico. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he completed his doctoral studies in 1994 under the supervision of Heini Halberstam. He was then a postdoc at UT Austin until 1998, while also doing software development at the NASA Ames Research Center during the summers of 1997 and 1998. In 1999, he settled Sierpinski’s conjecture on Euler's totient function.

In August 2014, Kevin Ford, in collaboration with Green, Konyagin and Tao, resolved a longstanding conjecture of Erdős 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.