Background
Kane was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Janet E. Mertz and Jonathan M. Kane, professors of oncology and of mathematics and computer science respectively.
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Daniel Kane
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Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Career
He is currently an assistant professor with a joint position in the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He was a mathematical prodigy. By 3rd grade, he had mastered K through 9th-grade mathematics.
Starting at age 13, he took honors math courses at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and did research under the mentorship of Ken Ono while dual enrolled at Madison West High School.
He earned gold medals in the 2002 and 2003 International Mathematical Olympiads. Prior to his 17th birthday, he resolved an open conjecture proposed years earlier by Andrews and Lewis.
Foreign this research, he was named Fellow Laureate of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 with two bachelor"s degrees, one in mathematics with computer science and the other in physics.
While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kane was 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.
Kane received his doctorate in mathematics from Harvard University in 2011. His dissertation, on number theory, was supervised by Barry Mazur. In his curriculum vitae, Kane lists as mentors Ken Ono while in high school, Erik Demaine, Joseph Gallian, and Cesar Silva while an undergraduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Barry Mazur, Benedict Gross, and Henry Cohn while a graduate student at Harvard.
Kane has written over 50 research papers in number theory, combinatorics, game theory, theoretical computer science, and related fields.
Achievements
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He also won the 2007 Morgan Prize and competed as part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling four times, earning the highest score three times and winning the Ben Fusaro Award in 2004, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Award in 2006, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award in 2007. He also won the Machtey Award as an undergraduate in 2005, with Tim Abbott and Paul Valiant, for the best student-authored paper at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science that year, on the complexity of two-player win-loss games. In 2010, joint work with Jelani Nelson and David Woodruff won both the International Business Machines Corporation Pat Goldberg Memorial and Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) best paper awards for work on an optimal algorithm for the count-distinct problem.
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Born
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Nationality
American
Awards
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Ben Fusaro Award; Morgan Prize
The Morgan Prize (actually Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student) is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the United States, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematics research.The Morgan Prize (actually Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student) is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the United States, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematics research.