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Ono Appointed Louis Martarano Professor of Mathematics

Ken Ono has been named Penn State's first Louis Martarano Professor of Mathematics.

Ono, who joined the Penn State faculty in the fall of 1997, is a number theorist whose interests include the theory of partitions, which is the study of how whole numbers are expressed as sums of other numbers.  His work on partitions has led to surprising new perspectives on the deeper structure of connections between partitions and complicated abstract objects in other areas of mathematics.  In many cases, Ono has made these complicated theoretical constructions more explicit by using partitions, for example, to devise a new method for studying points on elliptic curves. This is one of the main objects in the recently celebrated proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which for decades was the world's most famous unsolved mathematical problem.

Ono earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1989 at the University of Chicago and both a master's degree in 1990 and then a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1993 at the University of California in Los Angeles.  He held faculty positions in mathematics at Woodbury University at Burbank from 1991 to 1993, at the University of Georgia from 1993 to 1994, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1994 to 1995.  Ono was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1995 to 1997, when he joined the faculty at Penn State.  He was named a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 1995 and a National Security Agency Young Investigator in 1997.  Ono received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, a five-year Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1999.

The Louis Martarano Career Development Professorship, supported by a gift from Mr. Louis Martarano, was created in 1998 to provide critical financial support and encouragement for faculty starting their academic careers in the Eberly College of science.  In addition to providing recognition of the current achievements of the award recipients, this professorship demonstrates belief in their potential to achieve eminence in their fields.

"I am delighted to have the support of the Martarano Professorship," Ono says.  "It  will help me provide support for the graduate students and postdocs who are vital to my program."

Louis Martarano, the former Director of Project Finance for Merrill Lynch International, graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Chemistry in 1976.  He currently serves on the Eberly College of Science B.S./M.B.A.Program Advisory Panel and the Science Campaign Committee.
 
 

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This page is maintained by Barbara K. Kennedy: science@psu.edu, (814) 863-4682 and Leta A. Krumrine; LAK15@psu.edu, (814) 863-8453

Last update:  7 February 2000