Kevin Ford (mathematician)

Kevin B. Ford (born 22 December 1967) is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory.

Education and career
He has been a professor in the department of mathematics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2001. Prior to this appointment, he was a faculty member at the University of South Carolina.

Ford received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1990 from the California State University, Chico. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he completed his doctoral studies in 1994 under the supervision of Heini Halberstam.

Research
Ford's early work focused on the distribution of Euler's totient function. In 1998, he published a paper that studied in detail the range of this function and established that Carmichael's totient function conjecture is true for all integers up to $$10^{10^{10}}$$. In 1999, he settled Sierpinski’s conjecture on Euler's totient function.

In August 2014, Kevin Ford, in collaboration with Green, Konyagin and Tao, resolved a longstanding conjecture of Erdős on large gaps between primes, also proven independently by James Maynard. The five mathematicians were awarded for their work the largest Erdős prize ($10,000) ever offered. In 2017, they improved their results in a joint paper.

He is one of the namesakes of the Erdős–Tenenbaum–Ford constant, named for his work using it in estimating the number of small integers that have divisors in a given interval.

Recognition
In 2013, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.