Tenured University of Virginia professor Ken Ono, who has spent several years working with the UVA swim team, is headed west to Silicon Valley to tackle a new venture.
Ono, 57, was hired as a math professor at Virginia in 2019 and two years later, became a STEM Advisor to the Provost. During his time in Charlottesville, he’s made headlines in swim circles by working with Cavalier swimmers, analyzing the minutiae of stroke technique to optimize performance.
In 2023, he taught an independent study course (cross-listed in Data Science, Math, and Statistics) titled Learning Methods for Elite Swimming Analysis, and Kate Douglass and Claire Curzan were two of his students. He also worked closely with Paige Madden in the lead-up to her breakthrough performance at the 2024 Olympic Games.
Now, Ono is leaving his tenured position to work for one of his former students, Carina Hong, who has launched a new AI startup called Axiom Math.
However, he will still oversee his work and students at Virginia remotely, and continue working with Logan Redondo, UVA’s Director of Professional Performance and Data Analysis.
According to a feature in the Wall Street Journal published Thursday, Ono has previously made light of all the hype surrounding AI in recent years, beginning many of his talks by saying: “My name is Ken Ono, and I am NI. Naturally intelligent.”
However, now he’s reversed course, leaving UVA due to his belief in Hong’s venture.
Her company is named after the mathematical term for a basic truth that can be the starting point of an entire theory. Axiom Math’s ultimate goal is to build an AI mathematician capable of reasoning through known problems, finding new ones and validating its work through formal proofs,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Hong has raised $64 million thus far, with investors betting that a mathematical superintelligence will have commercial applications from software verification to financial engineering and algorithmic trading.
“If I’m the first, so be it,” Ono told the Wall Street Journal about his bold move. “I will not be the last.”
Ono says he’s been tracking the development of AI for the last number of years, and though he found its ability remarkable for tasks and problems it had already seen, he felt it lacked the ability to creatively solve new problems, which is paramount in his field of mathematics.
However, this past spring, he was one of a select 30 invited to Berkeley for a secret symposium where the mathematicians curated research-level problems at a “reasoning” chatbot to test its ability.
Ono left that conference with a different perspective.
“The lead I had on the models was shrinking,” he said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “And in areas of mathematics that were not in my wheelhouse, I felt like the models were already blowing me away.”
Though his initial reaction was negative, thinking AI may eventually take his job, something clicked.
“Then I had an epiphany,” he said. “I realized what the models were offering was a different way of doing math.
“I spend an hour or two every day spitballing with the models,” he said. “Late at night, if I can’t go to bed, I have my iPhone open, and I’m talking about math with the models at a crazy high level.”
Ono also feared federal research funding may be taking a hit in the future, with the Justice Department taking aim at higher education.
“I have the luxury of participating in transforming how the world actually works,” Ono said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “As a pure mathematician, that has rarely been the case.”
In addition to his work with the Virginia swimmers, Ono also recently worked with UVA engineering students to develop a new smart block to improve start efficiency.
Did Rumanujan communicate with the Aliens by using the pyramids as echo chambers? I saw that on the history channel. Guess who I think is behind that one (ahemm)? So he failed high school and goes to graduate school with no diploma, was never a professional athlete, but everyone thinks he was an olympic bicyclist from how he talks, and his dad worked in the united states after the atomic bomb was dropped but everyone thinks he worked on the Los Alamos project? In addition, he was kicked off of the American Mathematical Society because he used his position to gain money making a Superbowl commercial about beer, and they think that it violated a position of trust. Now he… Read more »
If I were an Olympic swimmer I would prefer someone who was in the Olympics to train me, not some guy who talks the talk and never walked the walk. Did Oppenheimer ask his dad to come to the United States after the atomic bomb dropped, because when he tells the story everyone thinks his dad worked on the Los Alamos project. In this story a 14 year old chinese woman invites Ono to California.
Yeah but what if he was an alien.
The only thing different between me and Ono is I went to school for Data Science, I didn’t proclaim I was a Data Scientist one day. I wonder if he knows how to wrangle.
Great minds need new challenges.
It was fun to follow the impact he made on the students and swimmers at UVA!
Best of luck as you change the world!
Why does Ono always work for the Chinese or Indian Government? Why are all his best students Asian or Indian?
woah, wasn’t sure what it’d be when I clicked on this but Axiom’s team is the real deal
This is like saying you were a professional bicycle rider and everyone claps, but everyone who rides bikes sees his figure and stays silent.
Fun fact, Dr. Ono does not have a high school diploma, he dropped out. Imagine being so smart that you can enroll at the University of Chicago without having graduated HS.
Imagine having a doctorate diploma but not a High School diploma.
In his story about racism affecting his family, I wonder if he knows gog poo burning on your front porch is the best joke ever. If it worked on someone when I was in high school I would bring my friends over to do it again. What you do is take the dog poo from your neighbor(preferably Ono in this case) and put it in a bag, put it on their porch, then as you ring the doorbell you light it on fire. When the guy opens the door he sees the bag on fire and stamps it out, and his foot is covered in dog poo. That is hilarious! If it works more than once it is extra extra… Read more »
“Minutiae” is an insane dihtionary pull
sad! but i assume helping swimmers is a passion project of his and he can still do testing on them a few times a year if he wants to