Dr. Jonathan David Farley has been a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a Science Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Seed Magazine named Dr. Farley one of “15 people who have shaped the global conversation about science in 2005.”

Dr. Farley is the 2004 recipient of the Harvard Foundation’s Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award, a medal presented on behalf of the president of Harvard University in recognition of “outstanding achievements and contributions in the field of mathematics.” The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts (home to both Harvard University and MIT) officially declared March 19, 2004 to be “Dr. Jonathan David Farley Day.”He received tenure at Vanderbilt University in 2003.  In 2001-2002, Dr. Farley was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to the United Kingdom. He was one of only four Americans to win this award in 2001-2002.

Jonathan Farley obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Oxford University in 1995, after winning Oxford’s highest mathematics awards, the Senior Mathematical Prize and Johnson University Prize, in 1994.

Farley graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1991 with the second-highest grade point average in his graduating class. (He earned 29 A’s and 3 A-’s.) While there, he won, among other awards, Harvard’s Wendell Prize, for the “most promising and catholic [small ‘c’] sophomore scholar.”

Jonathan Farley’s main areas of research are lattice theory and the theory of ordered sets.  His main results in these areas include the following: the resolution of a conjecture posed by MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Richard Stanley in 1975; the solution to a problem posed by Richard Stanley that had remained unsolved since 1981; the solution to some problems from Richard Stanley’s classic 1986 text, Enumerative Combinatorics: Volume I; the solution to a problem in “transversal theory” attributed to combinatorialist Richard Rado that had remained unsolved since 1971; the solution to several problems from the 1981 Banff Conference on Ordered Sets and the 1984 Banff Conference on Graphs and Order;  the solution to some problems of lattice theory pioneer George Grätzer from 1964; the solution to some problems of lattice theory pioneer E. T. Schmidt from 1974 and 1979; and the solution to a problem published in 1982 by universal algebra pioneer Bjarni Jónsson and Berkeley professor (now emeritus) Ralph McKenzie. 

• Farley, Jonathan David (2012).“How Al Qaeda Can Use Order Theory to Evade or Defeat U.S. Forces: The Case of Binary Posets,” in Evangelos Kranakis (Ed.), Advances in Network Analysis and Its Applications (pp. 299-306). Vienna, Austria: Springer Verlag. (galley proofs)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Maximal Sublattices of Finite Distributive Lattices. III: A Conjecture from the 1984 Banff Conference on Graphs and Order,” Canadian Mathematical Bulletin 54 (2011), 277-282. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Solution to Conjectures of Schmidt and Quackenbush from 1974 and 1985: Tensor Products of Semilattices,” Mathematica Pannonica 22 (2011), 135-147. (galley proofs)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David and Ryan Klippenstine. “Distributive lattices of small width, II: a problem from Stanley’s 1986 text Enumerative Combinatorics,” Journal of Combinatorial Theory (A) 116 (2009), 1097-1119. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Linear extensions of ranked posets, enumerated by descents. A problem of Stanley from the 1981 Banff conference on ordered sets,” Advances in Applied Mathematics 34 (2005), no. 2, 295-312. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David and Sungsoon Kim. “The automorphism group of the Fibonacci poset: a ‘not too difficult’ problem of Stanley from 1988,” Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics 19 (2004), no. 2, 197-204. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Quasi-differential posets and cover functions of distributive lattices. II. A problem in Stanley’s Enumerative Combinatorics,” Graphs and Combinatorics 19 (2003), no. 4, 475-491. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David and Bernd S. W. Schröder. “Strictly order-preserving maps into Z. II. A 1979 problem of Erné,” Order 18 (2001), 381-385. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Coproducts of bounded distributive lattices: cancellation. A problem from the 1981 Banff Conference on Ordered Sets,” Algebra Universalis 45 (2001), no. 4, 375-381. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Quasi-differential posets and cover functions of distributive lattices. I. A conjecture of Stanley,” Journal of Combinatorial Theory (Series A) 90 (2000), no. 1, 123-147. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Functions on distributive lattices with the congruence substitution property: some problems of Grätzer from 1964,” Advances in Mathematics 149 (2000), no. 2, 193-213. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, Jonathan David. “Priestley powers of lattices and their congruences. A problem of E. T. Schmidt,” Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (Szeged) 62 (1996), no. 1-2, 3-45. (PDF)
  
  
• Farley, J. D. “The automorphism group of a function lattice: a problem of Jónsson and McKenzie,” Algebra Universalis 36 (1996), no. 1, 8-45. (PDF)