Joshua Zahl

Joshua Zahl studies incidence geometry, harmonic analysis, and the Kakeya and restriction problems. He earned his BSc at Caltech and his PhD at UCLA in 2013, followed by an instructorship at MIT and a long-term faculty position at the University of British Columbia, where he received the PIMS/UBC Mathematical Sciences Early Career Award. With Hong Wang, he first proved the sticky Kakeya conjecture and then, in a landmark 2025 preprint, the full three-dimensional Kakeya set conjecture, establishing sharp volume estimates for unions of tubes in $\mathbb{R}^3$. In 2025 he moved to the Chern Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University. He shared the 2026 Clay Research Award for this work.

Workplaces: University of British Columbia, Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University

United States, Canada, China

Contributions, linked to the library