Takeo Nakasawa

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Takeo Nakasawa ( 中 澤 武雄 , born February 5, 1913 in Kōchi Prefecture , † June 20, 1946 in Khabarovsk ) was a Japanese mathematician. He is considered to be one of the fathers of the matroids theory (alongside Hassler Whitney ).

Nakasawa was born Takeo Sogabe and was adopted by the Nakasawa family in 1924. He studied mathematics at the Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences (the later - after the Second World War - Tokyo University of Education , whose successor in turn was the University of Tsukuba from the 1970s ) with the degree in 1935 (his teacher was Koshiro Nakamura) and was there until his discharge in August 1938 assistant. Afterwards his career as a mathematician ended and he moved to the newly conquered Manchuria, where he was in administration. He married in 1939 and had three children. After the Russian occupation, he was taken to Siberia for forced labor, where he died of malnutrition and exhaustion in a hospital.

He published only four mathematical papers between 1935 and 1938, all in German in the Bulletin of the Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences. Three of them dealt with what was later called matroids, the fourth with general topology. His contribution to the theory of matroids was only rediscovered in the 1980s (by Joseph PS Kung) and his biography only became known with the publication of an anthology about him in 2008.

literature

  • Hirokazu Nishimura, Susumu Kuroda (Ed.): A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa: The Forgotten Father of Matroid Theory, Birkhäuser 2008 (with English translation and German original of his four works)

The writings of Takeo Nakasawa in Science Reports of the Tokyo Bunrika Daigako:

  • On the Axiomatics of Linear Dependency I, Volume 2, No. 43, 1935, pp. 235-255, Part II, Volume 3, No. 51, 1936, pp. 45-69, Part III, Volume 3, 1936, No. 55, pp. 123-136
  • About the mapping chain from the projection spectrum, Volume 3, No. 64, 1938, pp. 205-216

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 消 え た 数学 者 中 澤 武雄 . Retrieved May 5, 2019.
  2. ↑ His death report from a hospital in Khabarovsk reached Japan in June 1946
  3. ↑ Kung, A source book in matroid theory, Birkhäuser 1986, p. 35. In it he states that Nakasawa and Whitney independently for the first time set up axioms for matroids. Nakasawa's works are not among the reprints at Kung.
personal data
SURNAME Nakasawa, Takeo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Kochi Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 1946
Place of death Khabarovsk