Background
Kahn grew up in New York City.
Kahn grew up in New York City.
He studied mathematics for his bachelor"s degree at Harvard University then received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995 under Curtis McMullen with thesis Holomorphic removability of quadratic polynomial Julia sets.
He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics. As a postdoc he was at the University of Toronto. He was assistant professor at Caltech and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
After that he worked for the investment firm Highbridge Capital Management as an analyst in financial mathematics.
Since 2011 he has been a professor at Brown University. On the basis of his success in the Putnam competition he became in 1988 a Putnam Fellow.
In 2014 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul and gave a talk The surface subgroup and the Ehrenpreis Conjectures.