NO STRAIGHT LINES
Earlier this year, mathematician Matthew Kahle received the coveted Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an award that acknowledges and supports promising young scientists and mathematicians.
Kahle, who came to Ohio State in August 2011, was nominated for the award by Department of Math Chair Luis Casian even before he arrived on campus.
“When we hired Matt Kahle as an assistant professor, we knew that we had made an extraordinarily good junior hire,” Casian said. “He was already considered a leader in the exciting new field of random topology, so proposing Kahle for a Sloan seemed a very natural thing to do.”
In his younger years, few who knew him might have guessed they would be seeing Kahle’s name on the Sloan Fellow list.
“I took a long, winding path to a tenure-track faculty position,” he said. “I always loved math. I competed in math competitions on a national level, but got bad grades in classes. I graduated from high school—but barely.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, that’s because you were bored.’ I love that romantic idea, but the truth is I was unfocused and unsure of what I wanted. Even as a little kid, I had a passion for math—I loved it. But not until I was away from it for a while did I realize I wanted to do it for a career.”
After high school, Kahle ended up at a community college, then attended Colorado State, and dropped out. Ultimately, he took about four and a half years off school working odd jobs—as a janitor, waiter, and working the graveyard shift at Kinko’s.
“In many ways, I was perfectly happy being a janitor,” Kahle said. “There’s not much supervision and there’s a sense of satisfaction—you feel like you did something and physically you can see the fruits of your labor. You walk into a dirty building; you walk out, it’s clean.
“What I did miss, though, was talking about math. And it was this that propelled me back into school. Despite common stereotypes, mathematicians are very social, collaborative, and helpful. We rely on conversations and the exchange of ideas—which is, I think, the future of math. Deeper problems are not solved by one person—sometimes it takes a team with different techniques.”
Kahle’s work is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative, at the intersection of different fields of math—topology and geometry; probability, statistical mechanics, and combinatorics.
Sloan Fellowship Winners
Ohio State’s Department of Mathematics is doing something very right. Kahle’s Sloan Fellowship makes it five in a row for their extraordinary junior faculty. He joins Roman Holowinsky (2011), Janet Best (2010), Chiu-Yen Kao (2009) and Jean-Francois Lafont (2008) in this select group.
All are doing leading-edge research in their areas: Best studies mathematical biology and dynamical systems; Holowinsky is a number theorist, whose work has implications for problems in physics; Kao is an applied mathematician whose work helps in designing materials with specific properties, such as solar cells; and Lafont works on differential geometry, geometric group theory, K-theory, and topology.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the two-year, $50,000 Sloan Research Fellowships annually since 1955 to early career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement to date and potential to make significant future contributions to their fields.
