Star mathematician Joshua Zahl leaves Canada for China after solving century-old puzzle

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Star mathematician Joshua Zahl leaves Canada for China after solving century-old puzzle

China has secured a major academic coup with the recruitment of mathematics luminary Joshua Zahl, recently celebrated for solving the more than 100-year-old three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture.

Zahl is leaving Canada’s University of British Columbia (UBC) to take up a full-time position as a chair professor at Nankai University’s Chern Institute of Mathematics (CIM), according to the Chinese educational institution’s website.

Zahl and his collaborator Wang Hong from New York University posted their milestone proof in a 127-page preprint paper on the open-access repository arXiv in February, and the feat was immediately hailed by the prominent UCLA mathematician Terence Tao.

Writing on his blog a day after the paper appeared, Tao described the achievement as “some spectacular progress in geometric measure theory”, confirming that Zahl and Wang had resolved “the three-dimensional case of the infamous Kakeya set conjecture”.

Tao, who is also Zahl’s doctoral mentor, has long been focused on the Kakeya problem. He published his ideas on the conjecture in 2014 on his blog, providing a foundation for Zahl and Wang’s work.

“It’s like perfecting a perpetual-motion machine. It’s magical; they are getting more out of the output than they put in. Their approach proves the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture,” Tao wrote.

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