Larry Guth

By Erik J. Larson, PhD

Guth is the Claude Shannon Professor of Mathematics at MIT. He did his Ph.D. in Mathematics at MIT in 2005. Prior to his appointment at MIT, Guth held appointments at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and at the University of Toronto.

Guth has wide ranging interests in mathematics, and has proved a number of important results in diverse areas. In 2015, he solved a conjecture put forth by Paul Erdos in 1946 known as the “distinct distances problem.” He is also working on problems in geometry, like the Kakeya set, a set of points in Euclidean geometry with the property of having a unit line segment in every direction.

Guth won the Salem Prize in 2013, and received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2010. As of 2019, Guth is Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

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