Shizuo Kakutani
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Shizuo Kakutani (Japanese: 角谷 静夫 Kakutani Shizuo; August 28, 1911 – August 17, 2004) was a Japanese-American mathematician, best known for an eponymous fixed-point theorem.
Kakutani attended Tohoku University in Sendai, where his advisor was Tatsujiro Shimizu. Early in his career he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study at the invitation of Hermann Weyl. While there, he also met John von Neumann.
During World War II Kakutani taught at Osaka University. He returned to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948, and was given a professorship by Yale in 1949.
The Kakutani fixed-point theorem is a generalization of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, holding for generalized correspondences instead of functions. Its most important use is in proving the existence of Nash equilibria in game theory.
Kakutani's other well-known mathematical contribution is the Kakutani skyscraper, a concept in ergodic theory.
The Collatz conjecture is also known as the Kakutani conjecture.
His daughter, Michiko Kakutani, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic for the New York Times.
[edit] List of Books available in English
- Selected papers / Shizuo Kakutani ; Robert R. Kallman, editor (1986)
