Iyanaga Shōkichi

Iyanaga Shōkichi (1969)

Iyanaga Shōkichi ( Japanese 弥 永 昌吉 ; * April 2, 1906 in Tokyo , † June 1, 2006 ibid) was a Japanese mathematician who dealt with number theory.

Life

Iyanaga was the son of a banker. He studied from 1926 to 1929 at the University of Tokyo with the number theorist Teiji Takagi , where he published his first scientific work as a student in 1928. In 1931 he studied with Emil Artin in Hamburg , whose course on class field theory he attended with Claude Chevalley . In 1932 he continued his studies in Paris and in the same year attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich with his teacher Takagi, with whom he then visited Berlin, Hamburg and Paris. After returning to Japan, Iyanaga became an assistant professor in Tokyo in 1935 (with Takagi). His most important work on number theory comes from the 1930s (for example a new proof of the main ideal theorem of class field theory, which was proven by Philipp Furtwängler , in the treatises of the Mathematical Seminar of the University of Hamburg in 1934). He stayed at the University of Tokyo , where he received a full professorship in 1942, until his retirement in 1967. He then taught until 1977 as a professor at Gakushuim University in Tokyo. There he took part in the number theory seminar at the age of 98.

Iyanaga was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Japan and received several international awards. In 1975 his book Theory of Numbers was published in English by North Holland. In 1955 he organized an international conference on number theory in Tokyo, which gave research there important impetus (including for the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture). He also brought Claude Chevalley to lectures in Japan (1953). Iyanaga was also active in mathematics education and wrote many textbooks for schools.

He wrote two books on Evariste Galois and published an autobiography in 2004. In 1954 he published the first edition of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics of the Japanese Mathematical Society ( Sugaku Jiten , later also published in English by MIT Press). 1960/61 Iyanaga was visiting professor at the University of Chicago and 1967/68 at the University of Nancy .

His students included Mikio Satō , Michio Suzuki , Kunihiko Kodaira , Takashi Ono , Michio Kuga , Goro Azumaya , Kenkichi Iwasawa and Tsuneo Tamagawa .

Iyanaga was president of the Japanese Mathematical Society on several occasions. From 1952 to 1955 he was on the Council of the International Mathematical Union . In 1976 he was awarded the Second Class Order of the Rising Sun and in 1978 he became a member of the Japan Academy. In 1979 he received the Order of the Palmes Academiques and in 1980 he became a member of the Legion of Honor .

Fonts

• Collected Papers , Iwanami Publishers 1994
• with Kunihiko Kodaira Gendai Sugaku Gaisetsu (Introduction to Modern Mathematics), Volume 1, Tokyo, Iwanami 1961
• Kikagaku Josetsu (Introduction to Geometry), Tokyo, Iwanami 1968

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Iyanaga Shōkichi. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography at the ICMI

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