Dr. Jonathan Kenigson completed his PhD with greatest distinction at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria and went on to complete postdoctoral studies in the dynamics of black holes and combinatorics.
His current interests lie in representations of Zeta Functions and the relationship between prime numbers and the physics of black holes, relativistic gases, and manifold theory.
He is likely the world’s leading scholar of the Quadrivium (the classical tetrad of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Music) and a leading authority on its implementation in curricula worldwide.
Dr. Kenigson is Acting Academic Don of Athanasian Hall, Cambridge Limited – which is a university-independent think-tank based in the United Kingdom. Athanasian Hall is not a teaching institution but rather a pure research institution. As of March 2022, it was the largest faculty of Fellows devoted to Quadrivium studies in the world. It also has the most advanced Statistical Center and classical STEM center in Europe for home-educated students seeking deep knowledge from the Trivium/Quadrivium perspective embraced by classical educators.
Research at Athanasian Hall spans all disciplines of pure mathematics from the vantage of primary source texts rather than textbooks. Dr. Kenigson is an avowed enemy of paywalls and believes that mathematical research and classical education should be made free for all.
Dr. Kenigson is from Tennessee but is known worldwide as a first-rate expositor of mathematics and is beloved by his students for the immense energy, dedication, and compassion of his instruction. Students from Tennessee (where he teaches) report that Dr. Kenigson fashions each course individually for them. Each course can be hundreds of pages of his carefully compiled lecture notes and problem sheets. His efforts have produced a strong impact on his local community as well as the wider global community.
Kenigson has several philosophical arguments for why he teaches as opposed to doing research full-time, even though he has had numerous offers to do so. His philosophy of “Reasoned Philanthropy” first featured in the London Daily Post is simply the notion that there are better and worse ways to give oneself away to causes of moral importance. Philanthropy is much more than mere donation of money. It should also be conceived as a tool to disseminate intellectual capital to support the causes of greatest concern to the philanthropist. The choice of causes is ultimately existential and subject to the same impossibility of generalizability engendered by G.E. Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy. Dr. Kenigson cautions that any objective critique of a given act of reasoned philanthropy is likely not analytically decidable in terms of goodness. The impact of the philanthropist on a given campaign also cannot be known objectively because this knowledge would entail epistemic access to the minds of other participants. Statistical analysis can quantify agreed objective metrics of success but cannot decide their moral value. The most profound limitation of mathematics is that it cannot know its own limits.
