Henry Cohn

Bio

Henry Cohn is an adjunct professor in the Mathematics Department since 2010 and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where he was one of three founding members in 2008.  He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2000 under the supervision of Noam Elkies, after which he joined the theory group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA for a year as a postdoc.  From 2001 to 2007 he was a researcher at Microsoft Research and affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington.  Cohn's research is in discrete mathematics, with interests including discrete geometry, coding theory, cryptography, combinatorics, computational number theory, and theoretical computer science.  A graduate of MIT, he received the Bucsela prize as the top undergraduate in the math department in 1995. Other distinctions include an American Institute of Mathematics Five-year Fellowship from 2000 through 2005, the Lester R. Ford Award from the MAA in 2005, and an invited address in combinatorics at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians. Cohn was made a Fellow of the AMS in 2015. He received the 2018 Levi L. Conant Prize of the American Mathematics Society (AMS), for his article, A conceptual breakthrough in sphere packing," Notices of the AMS, February 2017.