Person: Nagata, Masayoshi
Masayoshi Nagata was a Japanese mathematician who worked in the field of commutative algebra.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- In 1933, when he was six years old, Masayoshi began his schooling at the local primary school.
- In 1944 Nagata completed his middle school education and began his studies at the Eighth High School in Nagoya where he was a boarder.
- Nagata entered Nagoya Imperial University in April 1947 and there he studied mathematics under Tadasi Nakayama.
- He was producing outstanding research on infinite dimensional algebras and he advised Nagata in his studies in algebra.
- Nagata graduated in 1950 but he had already undertaken research in algebra and, resulting from this, had a number of papers in print: (with Noboru Ito) Note on groups of automorphisms (1949), On the structure of complete local rings (1950), and On the theory of semi-local rings (1950).
- Six months after graduating, Nagata was appointed as a research assistant in the Faculty of Science of Nagoya University.
- For example Heisuke Hironaka, who won a Fields Medal in 1970, was in his final undergraduate year at Kyoto when Nagata arrived and he continued to work in the Kyoto School of Algebraic Geometry for the following four years.
- Nagata was promoted to associate professor at Kyoto University in 1957 and, in February 1963, was appointed to the Chair of Algebra at Kyoto succeeding Yasuo Akizuki.
- It is worth commenting at this point that Nagata's skill in producing counterexamples led to his fellow mathematicians giving him the nicknamed "Mr Counterexample".
- Nagata announced his negative solution to Hilbert's 14th problem in his invited lecture On the fourteenth problem of Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 1958.
- As well as this outstanding research contribution, Nagata is famed for his outstanding books.
- Nagata's most famous book, Local rings, appeared in 1962.
- It is worth noting that the Noetherian rings which Nagata calls 'pseudo-geometric rings' in this book are now known as 'Nagata rings'.
- A number of Nagata's books are based of lecture courses he gave at different institutions.
- Polynomial rings and affine spaces (1978) is a written version of lectures given by Nagata in 1977 at Northern Illinois University.
- Among Nagata's students, we must mention Shigefumi Mori who studied for his doctorate with Nagata at Kyoto between 1975 and 1978.
- Mori was appointed to a chair at Kyoto University in 1990, the year in which his former supervisor Nagata retired.
- Nagata died of cancer at the age of 81.
Born 9 February 1927, Obu, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Died 27 August 2008, Kyoto, Japan.
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Origin Japan
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
