Legendary US mathematician Ken Ono: From influential mentor to working for former student Carina Hong's AI startup

Ono announced the move in a Facebook post last month, writing: "Life update: Erika and I are taking leave from UVA on a wild math + AI adventure. This isn't a goodbye to UVA, just a new chapter."

The decision marks a rare career shift for a senior academic whose work has shaped contemporary mathematics research and mentorship.

Founded in March 2025 in Silicon Valley, Axiom Math aims to build what it calls an "AI mathematician," a system designed not just to recognize patterns, but to reason through known mathematical results, generate new conjectures and verify them using formal proofs. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company takes its name from a mathematical axiom, a foundational truth from which entire theories are built.

At Axiom Math, Ono will serve as founding mathematician. His role includes designing representative problems that require deep understanding of new mathematical principles, setting benchmarks to measure the system's performance, and helping guide the overall direction of the startup's AI models.

Ono has said that while he initially underestimated AI when the technology first emerged, recent advances convinced him that it could fundamentally reshape how mathematics, and science more broadly, is done.

Ono joined the University of Virginia in 2019 as the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics after holding faculty positions at several leading U.S. institutions, including the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Over his career, he has become best known for his work on Ramanujan congruences, umbral moonshine and other core areas of number theory, earning a reputation as both a prolific researcher and an influential mentor.

Beyond research, Ono has played major leadership roles in the mathematics community. He has served as editor-in-chief of the journals Research in the Mathematical Sciences and Research in Number Theory, as an editor of The Ramanujan Journal, and as a member of the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics. He has also been active in mathematics education and outreach, advising university leadership on STEM initiatives.

Ono's impact is perhaps most visible through his students. Over the years, those he has mentored have gone on to win some of the most prestigious awards available to young mathematicians, including the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, the Morgan Prize, the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, and Rhodes Scholarships.

Among them is Hong, now CEO of Axiom Math and Ono's new boss, who has herself won major undergraduate mathematics prizes and is widely recognized as a standout talent in the field.

Although he is stepping away from classroom teaching, Ono will continue supervising research and students at UVA remotely. Responding to suggestions that his move represents a loss for academic mathematics, he wrote on LinkedIn that he expects to spend "even more time doing mathematics" in his new role.