Daniel Kane (mathematician)

Daniel Mertz Kane (born 1986) is an American mathematician at Stanford University. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Harvard University in 2011, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from MIT in 2007.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, to professors of mathematics and of biochemistry,^[1] Kane is one of four people since 2003 (and one of eight in the history of the competition) to be named a four-time Putnam Fellow in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.^[2] He also won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2002 and 2003 and won the 2007 Morgan Prize. In addition to his performance in high school and university level mathematics competitions, Kane has written over 50 research papers in number theory, theoretical computer science, ergodic theory, statistics of random set partitions, partition asymptotics, spherical designs, game theory, learning theory, constructions of Johnson-Lindenstrauss matrix families, computational geometry, and streaming computation of L^p moments. He won a Best Paper award at the 2010 Symposium on Principals of Database Systems (PODS),^[3] and a Best Paper award at the 2013 Conference on Computational Complexity.^[4]

Daniel was a mathematical prodigy. As a 6-year-old, he was already discovering arithmetic theorems and constructing proofs of their validity. By 3rd grade, he had mastered K through 9th-grade mathematics. In 5th grade, he achieved over 700 on the quantitative section of the SAT, qualifying for Johns Hopkins University’s Study of Exceptional Talent.^[5] In 7th grade he participated in the American Mathematics Competitions for the first time, scoring among the top 30 pre-college students in the US. He went on to earn gold medals in the 2002 and 2003 International Mathematical Olympiads. He was the first person to achieve a perfect score on the Virginia Tech Inter-college Mathematics Competition,^[6] doing so in 2002 at age 16. Starting at age 13, he took honors math courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while dual enrolled at Madison West High School, completing most of a mathematics major prior to matriculation to MIT for college at age 17. Prior to his 17th birthday, he resolved an open conjecture proposed years earlier by Andrews and Lewis; for this prodigious research, he was named Fellow Laureate of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.^[7]

References

External links

• Daniel Kane's homepage at Stanford
• Daniel Kane at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Daniel Kane's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad