Hao Huang (mathematician)

Hao Huang is a mathematician known for solving the sensitivity conjecture.[1][2] Huang is currently an associate professor in the mathematics department at National University of Singapore.[3]

Huang received a B.S. degree in mathematics at Peking University in 2007.[3] He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from his dissertation titled Various Problems in Extremal Combinatorics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2012 advised by Benny Sudakov.[4] His postdoctoral research was done at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and DIMACS at Rutgers University in 2012-2014, followed by a year at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota. Huang then became an assistant professor from 2015 to 2021 in the Department of Mathematics at Emory University.[3]

In July 2019, Huang announced a breakthrough, which gave a proof of the sensitivity conjecture.[5] At that point the conjecture had been open for nearly 30 years, having been posed by Noam Nisan and Mario Szegedy in 1992.[6] Huang has received positive attention for his discovery, as theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson described, "I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this."[7]

Huang received an NSF Career Award in 2019[8] and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2020.[9]

  1. ^ "Mathematician to present a proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture". phys.org. Retrieved 2019-12-21.
  2. ^ Klarreich, Erica (25 July 2019). "Decades-Old Computer Science Conjecture Solved in Two Pages". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 2019-12-21.
  3. ^ a b c "Welcome to Hao Huang's homepage". Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  4. ^ "Hao Huang - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved 2019-12-21.
  5. ^ Huang, Hao (2019). "Induced subgraphs of hypercubes and a proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture". Annals of Mathematics. 190 (3): 949–955. arXiv:1907.00847. Bibcode:2019arXiv190700847H. doi:10.4007/annals.2019.190.3.6. ISSN 0003-486X. JSTOR 10.4007/annals.2019.190.3.6. S2CID 195767594.
  6. ^ Nisan, Noam; Szegedy, Mario (1992). "On the degree of Boolean functions as real polynomials". Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing - STOC '92. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 462–467. doi:10.1145/129712.129757. ISBN 978-0-89791-511-3. S2CID 6919144.
  7. ^ Decades-Old Computer Science Conjecture Solved in Two Pages by Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, July 25, 2019
  8. ^ "NSF Award Search: Award#1945200 - CAREER: Algebraic Methods in Extremal Combinatorics". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2020-10-03.
  9. ^ "2020 Fellows". sloan.org. Archived from the original on 2020-09-25. Retrieved 2020-10-03.