Jonathan Kenigson: The Eccentric Mathematician Who Chose Poverty, Philosophy, and the Pursuit of Truth

Jonathan Kenigson is, by most standards, the most eccentric man you’d ever meet in a lifetime. By his own admission, he became “obsessed…with [my] own wickedness and recidivism” during his university years. After graduating at the top of a 1000-person class, he turned down interviews and offers from Wall Street quant firms and fully funded offers from highly ranked doctoral programs. Instead, he chose temporary voluntary homelessness and a life of poverty. For almost a decade, he lived in sheds, basements, and slept on sidewalks in the winter. He might have frozen or starved in Kansas or East Tennessee if his high-school dual-enrollment students hadn’t told their parents about him.

“I love my students more than anything. In East Tennessee, a kindly pastor and his generous wife had sons I taught. They were concerned about the severity of my lifestyle and offered for me to stay with them. At the time, they didn’t know the full severity of it [living conditions]. Fortunately, I took it as an opportunity to tutor the young men for competitive examinations. They excelled at these, and it was much easier to just go upstairs. The boys had an aptitude for mathematics.

”According to Kenigson, staying there gave him time to begin seriously studying statistics. “I never before possessed any interest in statistics as a discipline; instead, I was drawn more into the domain of partial differential equations, wave mechanics. Mathematics was always a goal in its own right. I wasn’t interested in anything that wasn’t proportional, beautiful, elegant. It wasn’t until 2013, perhaps, that I discovered the approach of the Soviet mathematical establishment toward problems in pure probability. Their approach was rigorous, formal, and austere. The crowning achievement of the Soviet program was the complete integration of statistical theory under the aegis of Real and Complex Analysis.”

Between 2013 and 2016, Kenigson gave more than 20 lectures at Sofia University in Bulgaria, mostly by distance means. In 2015, he moved to the Kansas City area, again donating almost all of his earnings to charity and living in a chicken coup and a ramshackle house with no heat in subzero temperatures. “This is the environment in which I envisioned myself flourishing most spiritually. I became convinced that I had been afflicted by chthonic [demonic] forces, that I had to make contrition and live in a very crude and primitive way. Doctors said I had been afflicted by some madness. I protested – unsuccessfully – that madness would not permit me to do rigorous mathematics and deliver lectures other mathematicians and philosophers could understand. I completed a dual doctorate under such conditions with multiple committees stating I had made substantive advances. They gave me tablets that dulled my ability to reason. To this day, I don’t think that I was mad. All of the major confessions [statements of church doctrine] maintain that chthonic forces are necessary parts of a Christocentric[Christian-based] theological economy.”

Again, Kenigson’s dual-enrollment students probably saved the day. “I was working with some students at a very competitive high school in Kansas City. I befriended three students who were so kind. Their parents were so kind. The boys had high mathematical aptitude and a facility for classical languages. The oldest two wrote compelling proofs in my class. I came over to their home to discuss a series of novel results in real analysisand Newton’s Mechanics [a form of calculus].” Instead of staying for a few hours, Kenigson stayed for a year. “I am so thankful for that family and love them. They helped me when I wasn’t cognizant that I needed help.”

Kenigson moved back to Tennessee in 2017 and continued writing at a rapid pace, publishing almost 200 articles and two books while teaching full-time. During the pandemic, he became a Cambridge research scholar and a research mathematician under the supervision of Kyiv University in Ukraine. In 2023, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow in Mathematics and Humanities at the Global Central for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. He studied philosophical topics at Oxford andin 2024, he renewed his affiliation with Cambridge (Kirby Laing Centre) as a Senior Research Scholar. In his words, “The pandemic was good to me. I get to help wonderful students at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee. Teaching students gives my life purpose and focus. But in the pandemic, everything in Europe went online. This helped me a lot, because I can work with my students during the day and write at other times. It’s the best of both worlds, teaching and research.”

Regarding his research, Kenigson seeks to build on his graduate study, which is common for mathematicians. “In my doctoral work, I became quite concerned with the underlying trouble with the so-called “constants of nature.” We often behave as if pi is perfectly standard and understood: It is the ratio of the circumference – the distance around – a circle, to the diameter – I mean, the distance across the same circle. Why is this an irrational number? Could it have been different in the past? Could the intrinsic value of pi have ever been a rational number [fraction of two whole numbers]? Has the force of gravity, of electromagnetism, have these changed over time and place? Some theories that I explored, like f(R) gravity, say that Einstein’s equations hold in the average, but we run into contradictions with existing observations of the rate of cosmic expansion. The universe is expanding very fast. Faster than the traditional equations predict it should.”

Black holes, cosmology, combinatorics, and philosophy intrigue Kenigson. “From 2016-2018, I gave a series of seminars in pure mathematics and philosophy of mathematics. In hindsight, I also was interested in philosophical anthropology – by that, I should be more specific, I intend to say philosophical questions concerning the exiguity and challenge of the human condition. The briefs I submitted ended up being dissected pretty thoroughly in Europe. I have always been fascinated by religion and religious studies – questions of ultimate purpose, ethics, what is entailed by a good life.”

In 2023, Kenigson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (England), a think-tank headquartered in London that is devoted to the mitigation of especially difficult social problemsthat often cross national boundaries and demand exacting mathematical study. He was made a member of the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research and a group member in Statistics of the Alan Turing Institute, British think-tanksdevoted to Artificial Intelligence, Computing, and mathematics.He worked on several projects for GCAS, an EU think-tank devoted to tackling problems like global climate change, AI security, and nuclear risk mitigation. In his words, “I began to think seriously about Augustine and Aquinas’s doctrine of total depravity. My mathematics is just another vocabulary for total depravity. It is an existential analytic of what the Desert Fathers like Saint Anthony and Saint Gregory Nazianzen endured in the desert, in isolation like I used to live.” In 2024, Kenigson won the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award from the US President, Joe Biden. This is the highest award a US civilian can get for service to the community. Only a handful have ever beengiven in the past two decades. Kenigson was very likely considered for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to expand curriculum around the world, with five or more published articles in the US and England calling for his nomination. “I honestly forgot that I was possibly being considered. I didn’t think I deserved it and was thankful I didn’t get it in 2024. That’s a crowning achievement for a life. I’m confident that I’m not near that caliber yet, and maybe never will be.”

Kenigson’s interests are now more centered on cosmology again. He’s pondering whether we are all stuck in a black hole and don’t know it. “Holographic theories of black hole formation state that the information that enters isn’t lost. Rather, it’s stored on the boundary of the black hole, in the manner of data stored on the hard drive of a computer. In the parlance of mathematics, we are dealing with a point of instability on the surface of a 4-manifold. These are usually well-behaved (4-manifolds), but a great number of interesting questions in low-dimensional topology are still open as of this time. Holographic universe theories derive from the analogies with black holes. Any way we measure distances and angles in the universe – through velocities, accelerations, orbital mechanics – all of these, according to classical cosmology, must obey a set of equations that govern how the underlying space is changing with respect to where you are as an observer.”

When asked about his future goals, Kenigson remarked that he “has none. Civil society fails to protect the vulnerable because the human heart is not courageous enough to face the evils it engenders. In light of this realization, I’ve concluded that having any ambition other than simple good will and love of both neighbor and enemy is illogical. Once I master that, I can move on. My intuition is that it will take awhile to crush my stubborn will enough to progress past this juncture.” In 2022, Kenigson was credited by London Daily Post with forming a new philosophy called “Reasoned Philanthropy.” Kenigson denies that he invented it. “I’m not sure what Reasoned Philanthropy is. I’ve never made anything like a philosophical defense of Utilitarianism. Bentham, Mill, and later Rawls did much better than I ever could. I’m glad, though. I hope something I did seemed to help people make sense of troubles they are facing.”