Tadashi Tokieda

Tadashi Tokieda (born April 2, 1968 , Japanese 時枝正 ) is a Japanese mathematician whose main field is mathematical physics . He is a professor at Stanford University , previously he was Director of Studies for Mathematics at Trinity Hall , Cambridge . Compared to other mathematicians, he had an unusual path in life: he started as a painter, then became a classical philologist and finally switched to mathematics.

life and career

Tokieda was born in Japan and grew up as a painter. He was trained as a classical philologist in France. According to his personal profile, he taught himself mathematics by himself. He graduated from Jochi University in Tokyo in 1989 with a degree in Classical Philology and again in 1991 with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Oxford University (where he was a British Council Fellow). He did his PhD at Princeton University, his doctoral supervisor was William Browder (Dissertation: Null sets of symplectic capacity).

In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he became Dean of Studies in Mathematics and Stephan and Thomas Körner Fellow.

He was the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow from 2013-14 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at Harvard University .

He collects, invents and studies toys that also serve as inspiration for mathematical studies. These toys are often easy to make and he will demonstrate them in public lectures, e.g. B. in the Summer Science Exhibition of the Royal Society in London 2007, in lectures at the Courant Institute (Holiday Lectures 2004, 2009), or at the Sorbonne (on the occasion of the centenary of Henri Poincaré).

In the 2015-16 academic year he was Poincaré Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Tokieda is fluent in Japanese , French and English . He also has knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, classical Chinese, Finnish, Spanish and Russian. So far he has lived in six countries. He is invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2018 in the section Mathematics Didactics.