John Erik Fornæss is a Norwegian-American mathematician and author. Fornæss earned his master's degree in 1970 from the University of Oslo with the thesis Uniform approximation on manifolds and earned his PhD in 1974 from the University of Washington under Edgar Lee Stout with thesis Embedding Strictly Pseudoconvex Domains in Convex Domains. At Princeton University in 1974, he became an instructor, assistant professor in 1976, associate professor in 1978, and a full professor in 1981. Since 1991, he has served as a professor at the University of Michigan.