Kotani Masao

Kotani Masao in London in 1952

Kotani Masao ( Japanese 小 谷 正雄 ; born January 14, 1906 in Kyōto Prefecture ; † June 6, 1993 ) was a Japanese theoretical physicist who dealt with quantum chemistry and biophysics.

biography

Kotani went to school in Osaka and studied physics at the University of Tokyo and after graduating in 1929 taught for three years in the engineering faculty before becoming an assistant professor in the physics faculty and a professor after his doctorate in 1943. In 1965 he moved to Osaka University as a professor . In 1969 he resigned from his professorship and became president of the private Tokyo Science University, which he remained until 1982. Even afterwards he remained closely connected to the university as a consultant.

At the end of the 1920s, he studied the new quantum mechanics according to foreign magazines, together with his college friend, the later Professor Inui Tetsurō and Professor Yamanouchi Takahiko . He was particularly impressed by the early work of Walter Heitler and Fritz London on hydrogen in quantum chemistry (1927). In the early 1930s he was the only physicist among the chemists who researched catalyst effects for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

In the pre-computer era he was known for the integral tables he published on quantum chemistry. Although they were more difficult to use than comparable tables from Heinzwerner Preuss , for example , they were numerically more accurate. He started calculating in the 1930s (first published in 1938) using only mechanical calculators. They appeared in book form in 1953.

At Osaka University, he turned to biophysics, specifically the magnetic and electronic properties of hemoglobin and similar proteins and the oxygenation curve (oxygen saturation) of hemoglobin.

He also dealt with many other areas of quantum mechanics, special functions of mathematical physics (such as Mathieu functions), and even as a student in 1929 published a paper on celestial mechanics, the result of a lecture he attended at the time.

In 1948 he received the "Prize of the Japanese Academy of Sciences " (for work on magnetron and microwave circuits with Tomonaga Shin'ichirō ), in 1977 he was honored as a person with special cultural merits and in 1980 he was also awarded the Japanese Order of Culture .

From 1978 to 1982 he was President of CODATA and from 1955 to 1960 Vice President of IUPAP .

Fonts

• with M. Kotani, A. Amemiya, E. Ishiguro, T. Kimura: Table of Molecular Integrals, Tokyo 1953, 2nd edition 1963
• with Kimio Ohno, Kunifusa Kayama: Quantum mechanics of electronic structure of simple molecules, Handbuch der Physik , Volume 37-2, 1961

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Kotani Masao . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 833.

Web links

• Biography of Kimio Ohno: In Memory of Professor Masao Kotani , Int. J. Quant. Chem., Vol. 53, 1995, pp. 451-454

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