Kazuya Kato
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kato Kazuya (male, born on January 17, 1952) is a mathematician. He grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan and is currently a professor at Kyoto University. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980.
His specialisation is number theory, in particular the higher-dimensional generalisations of local class field theory, and globalisation. His contributions include a partial proof of the Iwasawa theory of automorphic forms, and the construction of (phi, Gamma) -modules for p-adic epsilon elements, and some results towards the BSD conjecture. He collaborated with Spencer Bloch towards some results concerning the Tate-Hodge conjecture, and is also known for the Bloch-Kato conjecture on Tamagawa numbers of L-functions, and came up with log algebraic geometry with Fontaine and Illusie.
He is a renowned speaker with a unique style, very popular among students. He also composed the "Prime Number Song" (in Japanese)
[edit] Famous rumours
- When he was a grad student, he was doing math half-naked at Kichijojironron (a famous Tokyo mall), until the police dragged him away.
- Right now, he is a world-renowned leader in number theory, but during college his grades were far from good and he was not allowed to major in astronomy. So he did aeromechanical engineering instead, where he had to repeat a year. But then he discovered math and scored top on an algebra exam.
- He used up one notebook a day during college
- When presenting his results on the Hodge-Tate conjecture, Deligne was so surprised that he fell off his chair.
- It is rumoured that he is from planet zeta
- He hears the prime numbers sing
- He compassionately understands what it feels for a sequence to have the wish to converge
- He invented a prime number dance
- When working at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he forgot to lock his office door and some homeless man started living there.
- He composed the zeta laugh song
- His advisor is Ihara
- His younger brother was more intelligent, but died.
- He is the advisor of Yoshida, Saito, Masato Kurihara, and Oda Tuji.
[edit] Biography
- 1975 - BA from Tokyo University
- 1977 - MA from Tokyo U. Becomes teaching assistant.
- 1980 - PhD from Tokyo U.
- 1982 - becomes lecturer at Tokyo U.
- 1984 - assistant prof at Tokyo U.
- 1988 - awarded the spring medal of the Japanese Math Society for his work on higher dimensional H class field theory
- 1990 - full professor at Tokyo U
- 1992 - moves to Tokyo Institute of Technology
- 1995 - Inoue Award for his work on number theory connected with p-adics methods in algebraic manifolds
- 1997 - moves back to Tokyo U.
- 2001 - moves to Kyoto U.
- 2002 - Asahi newspaper award for his work on number theory
- 2005 - Japan Gakushiin Award for his work on number theory and arithmetic geometry.
[edit] Books
He wrote a book on Fermat's last theorem and is also the author of the two volumes of the famous trilogy on Number Theory, of which the first has been translated into English and is entitled "Fermat's Dream"
