Henry Cohn

Henry Cohn is an American mathematician. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at MIT. In collaboration with Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Maryna Viazovska, he solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions. In 2003, with Chris Umans he initiated a group-theoretic approach to matrix multiplication, and is a core contributor to its continued development with various coauthors.

Cohn graduated from Harvard University in 2000 with a doctorate in mathematics. Cohn was an Erdős Lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008. In 2016, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to discrete mathematics, including applications to computer science and physics."

In 2018, he was awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize for his article “A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing,” published in 2017 in the Notices of the AMS.