Yutaka Taniyama

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Yutaka Taniyama ( Japanese 谷 山 豊 , Taniyama Yutaka , actually Taniyama Toyo ; born November 12, 1927 in Kisai near Tokyo , † November 17, 1958 in Tokyo) was a Japanese mathematician.

Life

Taniyama grew up as the son of a country doctor in Kisai, a small village near Tokyo. His school career was delayed because he fell ill with tuberculosis and had to take two years out of school. In 1953 he graduated from the University of Tokyo , where he became a research student and assistant professor. Together with his friend Gorō Shimura - who continued much of his work after his death - he established the Taniyama Shimura conjecture from 1955 to 1957 ; This means that the L-functions of elliptical curves over the rational numbers can always be expressed as modular forms . The formulation and propagation of the importance of this conjecture comes fromAndré Weil (that's why his name is sometimes added to the conjecture), who Shimura and Taniyama met in 1955 at a conference on algebraic number theory in Tokyo. This conjecture provided an important element in the proof of Fermat's Great Theorem by Andrew Wiles (1995) and was fully proven in 1999.

In unexplained circumstances and apparently for no reason, Taniyama committed suicide five days after his 31st birthday and in the middle of preparing for his wedding. He left a suicide note in which he stated that the impulse to commit suicide came spontaneously and was incomprehensible to himself. Less than a month later, his fiancée Misako Suzuki followed him into her death.

In an obituary, his friend Shimura characterizes him as withdrawn and essentially only interested in mathematics (occasionally he went to the cinema or listened to classical music - especially Beethoven's 8th Symphony).

Literary processing

The figure of the mathematician Makoto Kurabashi in Michael Köhlmeier's novel "Abendland" is inspired by Taniyama. From Taniyama's biography, roughly the year of birth and death, the tuberculosis disease as an adolescent, the formulation of the presumption of the equivalence of L-functions of elliptical curves and modular shapes as well as death by suicide were taken from Taniyama's biography.

Fonts

  • with Gorō Shimura : Kindai-teki Seisu-ron (Modern Number Theory), Kyoritsu Shuppan, 1957 (Japanese)
  • with Goro Shimura: Complex multiplication of abelian varieties and its applications to number theory , Publications of the Mathematical Society of Japan 6, Kenkyusha, Tokyo 1961 (English; posthumous)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 埼 玉 ゆ か り の 偉人 / 検 索 結果 （詳細） . Saitama Prefecture, archived from the original on June 28, 2008 ; Retrieved February 23, 2010 (Japanese, Yutaka is a far more common reading of 豊 for first names).
  2. ↑ in his obituary, Shimura admires Taniyama's ability to always make mistakes in the right direction
  3. ↑ "Until yesterday, I had no firm intention of killing myself. But more than one must have noticed that I was drained both physically and mentally. As for the cause of my suicide, I don't fully understand it myself, but it is not the result of any particular incident or matter. I just want to say that I am in a state of mind where I have lost faith in my future. There may be someone who will be grieved or hit by my suicide. I sincerely hope this incident does not cast a dark shadow over that person's future. Anyway, I can not deny that this is a kind of betrayal, but please excuse the last act in my own way, as I have kept all my life "after Dinoj Surendran. In his own way (on its own way; English : uz.ac.zw ( Memento from August 11, 2006 in the Internet Archive ))
  4. ↑ see also Goro Shimura : Why I wrote that article in The map of my life , Springer, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-387-79714-4 , pp. 145f. (English)
personal data
SURNAME Taniyama, Yutaka
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 谷 山 豊 (Japanese); Taniyama Toyo (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Kisai near Tokyo
DATE OF DEATH 17th November 1958
Place of death Tokyo