Fujisawa Rikitarō

Rikitaro Fujisawa

Fujisawa Rikitarō ( Japanese 藤 沢 利 喜 太郎 ; * October 12, 1861 ( traditionally : Bunkyū 1/9/9) in Sado Province (today: Niigata Prefecture ); † December 23, 1933 ) was a Japanese mathematician.

Life

Fujisawa came from a noble family, attended the Tokyo English School ( Tōkyō Eigo Gakkō ) in 1874, the Tokyo Kaisei School ( Kaisei Gakkō ) in 1876 and studied at its successor institution, the University of Tokyo , from 1878 , graduating in 1882. After that, he was in Europe until 1887 (Summer 1883 London , December 1883 Berlin , September 1884 Strasbourg ) to study mathematics, where he studied under Hermann Aron , Elwin Bruno Christoffel , Hermann von Helmholtz , Gustav Robert Kirchhoff , Johannes Knoblauch , Leopold Kronecker , August Kundt , Eugen Netto , Theodor Reye and Karl Weierstrass studied. In 1886 he received his doctorate under Christoffel at the University of Strasbourg ( on an infinite series that occurs in the theory of heat conduction and progresses according to the roots of a transcendent equation ). After his return in 1887 he was professor of mathematics at the University of Tokyo until his retirement in 1921 (the second mathematics professor in Japan after Kikuchi Dairoku ). In 1903 he was chairman of the Mathematical-Physical Society Tokyo and in 1906 became a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences . From 1925 he was a representative of this in the Japanese mansion and was elected for a second term in 1932.

Soon after beginning his teaching in Tokyo, Fujisawa, who had attended the Theodor Reyes seminar in Strasbourg, began to establish the institution of the research seminar based on the German model. His students include the number theorist Takagi Teiji , the first Japanese mathematician who, after Japan opened up to the West in the Meiji period, made significant contributions to modern mathematics (class field theory). Fujisawa was the actual incubator of modern, contemporary mathematics in Japan, which he disseminated with the latest textbooks from his European trip to Japan. Before that, studying mathematics from the West often consisted of just memorizing texts.

In addition to his mathematical work (he was also active in mathematics education and wrote a report on mathematics teaching in Japan for the International Commission for the Teaching of Mathematics), he published political papers, on economics and finance, and on insurance (in 1889 he published a book on Life Insurance Theory).

In 1900 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris ( Note on the mathematics of the old Japanese school ). In it he took the view that the zero and the imaginary numbers were found independently in Japan, a view that was not accepted.

In 1920 he was awarded the Order of the Holy Treasure, 1st class.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rikitaro Fudzisawa: About an infinite series that occurs in the theory of heat conduction and that progresses according to the roots of a transcendent equation . Strasbourg 1886, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb00074584-8 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} 藤 澤利 喜 太郎 生 誕 150 年 祭 ("150th birthday of Fujisawa Rikitarō"). Japanese Mathematical Society, accessed September 28, 2015 (Japanese). 
3. ↑ Harald Kümmerle: Fujisawa Rikitarō to kenkyū gimu . In: Arīna . No. 21 , 2018, p. 97-105 ( [1] [accessed December 23, 2018]).
4. ↑ Memoirs of Takagi 1935, quoted in Aiko Ikeo, A History of Economic Science in Japan, Routledge 2014, p. 97

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