Joseph Kohn

Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Princeton University

Joseph Kohn was born in Prague, on May 18, 1932. He emigrated to Ecuador in 1939 and to the US in 1945. There, he received his BS at MIT 1953, and his Ph.D. at Princeton, in 1956.

He served as a Professor at Brandeis University 1958-1968 and at Princeton since 1968.

Professor Kohn’s research regards the Theory of Several Complex Variables, Partial Differential Equations, and related fields.

He has enjoyed the honor of being a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member United States National Academy of Sciences. He has received the American Mathematical Society Steele and Bergmann prizes, and the Bolzano prize of the Czechoslovak Union of Mathematicians and Physicists. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bologna, and a title in the Brooklyn Technical High School Hall of Fame.

Participant In These Roundtable Discussions

Sat
Sep 20th
2014

Watch

Knowledge and Limitations

This roundtable will examine the scope and limits of human knowledge about the universe, and whether metaphysical inquiry can be integrated with empirical approaches to understanding nature.

Thu
Jan 1st
2015

Watch

Science and the Big Questions: Roundtable Series on the Physical and Spiritual World, the Brain-Mind Connection, and Human Development and Genetics

This series of fourteen roundtables will explore fundamental questions across the sciences and humanities, including knowledge and its limits, infinity, complexity and emergence, consciousness, memory, free will, genius, development, and the nature of human experience.

Sat
May 12th
2018

Watch

The Completeness of Physics

This roundtable examines whether science’s empirical success implies a universal account of reality, or whether reality is better understood as consisting of multiple ontological levels and a plurality of scientific frameworks. It considers tensions between reductionist and pluralist views, and reflects on the implications of these positions for the status of the humanities, the possibility of a unified theory of reality, and the limits of human cognition in grasping such unity.