Number theorist wins national teaching award

Ken Ono, a mathematician at UW–Madison, is one of seven scholars to receive the National Science Foundation (NSF) Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars during a ceremony here at the National Academy of Sciences.

“The awards are NSF’s recognition of accomplishments by scientists and engineers whose roles as educators and mentors are considered as important as their groundbreaking results in research,” said NSF’s director, Arden L. Bement Jr. Winners receive up to $300,000 for four years.

“I am very pleased to get this award, ” says Ono, a Solle P. and Margaret Manasse Professor of Letters and Science. “I want to spend all the [award money] on gifted students at all levels who want to pursue research in mathematics.”

Specifically, Ono intends to run an annual eight-week summer institute that will recruit top math students from around the country. He will also participate in “outreach site visits” to middle schools and high schools around the country in collaboration with the American Mathematical Society and Science Service.

In addition to hands-on classroom activities, site visits will feature a game show loosely based on the TV program “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Students will compete for prizes and scholarships, with local winners meeting for a year-end standoff at the “Tournament of Champions.”

Ono is most renowned for solving the 80-year-old problem of the “Ramanujan congruences,” which described a series of patterns that emerge when the prime numbers 5, 7 and 11 are divided into “partitions,” or sums of numbers. Ono made the unexpected finding that such patterns exist for all higher prime numbers.

The mathematician has also done important work in the areas of modular forms, elliptic curves and L-Series, and has advised since 1997 numerous post-doctoral, doctoral and undergraduate students.

Gary Sandefur, the UW–Madison Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and mathematicians George Andrews of Penn State University and Barry Mazur of Harvard University together nominated Ono for the NSF award.