Person: Sato, Mikio
Mikio Sato was a Japanese mathematician whose vision of "algebraic analysis" and mathematical physics initiated several fundamental branches of mathematics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Mikio was seven years old only days after beginning school but the entrance rules were rigorously imposed.
- It was around the time that Sato entered middle school that he became interested in mathematics.
- Other school subjects, however, did not interest Sato and except for mathematics he found middle school boring.
- In 1945, after the war ended, Sato entered the First High School in Tokyo, a school closely linked to the University of Tokyo.
- However, things did not work out for Sato as he had hoped.
- Sato then changed to study theoretical physics, first at the University of Tokyo then after two years at the Tokyo School of Education where he studied until 1958.
- Sato held this position for two years, 1958-60, then was appointed as a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Education.
- Iyanaga had sent Sato's work to André Weil who was impressed and, as a consequence, invited Sato to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
- After this Sato published nothing on hyperfunctions (or anything else for that matter) for ten years.
- After returning from Princeton, Sato worked at Osaka University from the spring of 1963.
- Returning to Japan, Sato resigned from Osaka in the autumn of 1966.
- Sato served as director of Research Institute for the Mathematical Sciences from 1987 to 1991.
- Sato explained the new theory of microlocal analysis in his lecture Regularity of hyperfunctions solutions of partial differential equations at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Nice in 1970, but the details appear in the 165 page paper by Sato, Kawai and Kashiwara Microfunctions and pseudo-differential equations in the proceedings of the Katata Conference held in 1971.
- In addition to the deep mathematical results we mentioned above, Sato has also made major contributions to theoretical physics.
- In addition to his work in analysis and in mathematical physics, Sato has obtained many outstanding results in both group theory and number theory.
- Sato has received many honours for his remarkable achievements in mathematics and theoretical physics.
- Professor Sato has been the driving force behind a world-leading group of researchers in algebraic analysis.
- Sato is deeply interested in and motivated by problems in theoretical physics.
- In 2003 Sato received the Wolf Prize.
- Along with his students, Sato developed holonomic quantum field theory, providing a far-reaching extension of the mathematical formalism underlying the two-dimensional Ising model, and introduced along the way the famous tau functions.
- Sato provided a unified geometric description of soliton equations in the context of tau functions and infinitedimensional Grassmann manifolds.
- Sato has generously shared his ideas with young mathematicians and has created a flourishing school of algebraic analysis in Japan.
Born 18 April 1928, Tokyo, Japan. Died 9 January 2023, Kyoto, Japan.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Japan, Prize Wolf
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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
