Kawaguchi Akitsugu

Kawaguchi Akitsugu ( Japanese 河口 商 次 ; * April 8, 1902 in Kumamoto Prefecture ; † July 30, 1984 ) was a Japanese mathematician and university professor .

Life and career

Kawaguchi studied mathematics from 1922 to 1928 at the Imperial University of Tōhoku in Sendai (now Tōhoku University ), where he received his bachelor's degree in 1925 . He spent the years 1928–1930 with further studies in Europe , especially in Germany and Italy , in India and in the USA . In 1930 he became an associate professor at the University of Hokkaidō and there in 1932 a full professor . He held this position until his retirementin 1966. He also taught as a visiting professor at Nihon University from 1952 to 1970 . In addition, worked from 1967 in a managerial position at the Technical University Sagami (today Technical University Shonan ).

Scientific achievements

Kawaguchis works mainly and with great appreciation in the field of geometry and in particular in the field of differential geometry . Here he undertook extensive investigations into projective differential geometry and developed many of the necessary tools of the tensor calculus . Kawaguchi made significant achievements in the study of Finsler geometry , for which he is considered one of the pioneers. He is also the founder of the so-called higher order geometry ( English higher order geometry ), where, according to him the geometric structural class of so-called Kawaguchi areas ( English Kawaguchi spaces ) is named.

In 1938 Kawaguchi founded the scientific society Tensor in Sapporo and, in connection with it, the scientific journal of the same name, the aim of which is the promotion and further development of differential geometry and the international cooperation of differential geometry.

Fonts

As an author or co-author (and in several languages, not least in Japanese , German , Italian and English ), Kawaguchi made more than 150 scientific publications and wrote 36 specialist books in which he treated all branches of geometry.

swell

• Siegfried Gottwald , Hans-Joachim Ilgauds and Karl-Heinz Schlote (ed.): Lexicon of important mathematicians . Verlag Harri Deutsch , Thun 1990, ISBN 3-8171-1164-9 , p. 243 . MR1089881
• Lajos Tamássy : Professor Akitsugu Kawaguchi . In: Facta Universitatis . tape 3 , 2003, p. 775-777 ( [1] [PDF]).
• Weblink to MathSciNet (selection of Kawaguchi's work)

footnote

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Kawaguchi is the family name, Akitsugu the first name.