Ogura Kinnosuke

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Ogura Kinnosuke ( Japanese 小 倉 金 之 助 ; born March 14, 1885 in Sakata ( Yamagata Prefecture ); † October 21, 1962 in Tōkyō ) was a Japanese mathematician , mathematics educator and mathematics historian who was influential in reforming mathematics teaching in Japan in the 1920s was.

Life

Ogura studied at the Tokyo Physics Academy ( 東京 物理 学校 , Tōkyō butsuri gakkō , today: Tokyo University of Natural Sciences ), where he graduated in 1905 and taught from 1910. From 1911 to 1917 he was an assistant at the newly founded University of Tōhoku , where he received his doctorate in 1916 ( orbits in a conservative force field ). From 1917 to 1937 he was a scientist at the Shiomi Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (founded by Nagaoka Hantarō , later part of Osaka University ). From 1919 to 1922 he did a research stay in France, where he studied with Jacques Hadamard and Paul Langevin at the Collège de France , had contact with mathematicians such as Émile Borel and lectured at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Strasbourg in 1920. On his return he was convinced that mathematics should be taught on a broader basis in Japan and not just reserved for an elite, as was the case in Japan. He lectured on it and published books for this purpose ( Fundamental Problems of Mathematics Education , 1924, Japanese). In 1940 he became director of today's Tokyo University of Science. In 1946 he became president of the Society of Democratic Scientists in Japan.

After translating Florian Cajori's book on the history of elementary mathematics into Japanese, he also turned to the history of mathematics. Under the influence of the Marxist philosopher Plekhanov , he wrote influential articles on mathematics in class societies in the magazine Shiso in 1929 and 1930. His article on the social nature of Chinese mathematics in 1934, in which he treated the interrelationships between mathematics and society in the Chinese Han dynasty using the classical Chinese treatise Nine Books on Mathematical Technique ( Jiu Zhang Suanshu ), was also very influential, especially among Chinese mathematicians . He corresponded with Li Yan on Chinese history of mathematics. In 1935 he wrote an article against the racist view of mathematics propagated by Ludwig Bieberbach in Germany . Despite his liberal attitude, however, he allowed himself to be engaged in the Japanese war effort in 1941 (as part of the support society Taisei Yokusankai ), which he regretted even after the war.

Another influential article by Ogura is about comparing the mathematical history of Japan and China. In it, he emphasizes that Japan completely broke with its mathematical tradition in the Meiji period and also adopted that of the West in its notation and was thus successful, in contrast to China, which was isolating itself.

From 1973 to 1975 his collected works were published in 8 volumes.

literature

  • Tetu Makino The mathematician K. Ogura and the great east asia war , in Bernheim Booß-Bavnbek, Jens Hoyrup Mathematicians and War , Birkhäuser 2003
  • S. Noma (Ed.): Ogura Kinnosuke . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993. ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 1131.

Individual evidence

  1. a b 小 倉 金 之 助 . In: デ ジ タ ル 版 日本人 名 大 辞典 + Plus at kotobank.jp. Kodansha, January 20, 2009, accessed September 6, 2010 (Japanese).
  2. ^ In English translation Tokyo College of Science
  3. ^ Jean-Claude Martzloff A history of chinese mathematics , Springer, p. 10