Heisuke Hironaka

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Heisuke Hironaka
Born	April 9, 1931
Nationality	Japan
Institutions	Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Oscar Zariski
Notable awards	Fields Medal in 1970

Heisuke Hironaka (広中平祐 Hironaka Heisuke; born April 9, 1931) is a Japanese mathematician. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kyoto University, he received his Ph. D. from Harvard while under the direction of Oscar Zariski. He won the Fields Medal in 1970.

He is celebrated for proving in 1964 that singularities of algebraic varieties admit resolutions in characteristic zero. This means that any projective variety can be replaced by a similar one (i.e. birationally equivalent) which has no singularities.

Hironaka was for many years a professor of mathematics at Harvard University but currently lives in Japan, where he is greatly respected and influential. He has been active in raising funds for causes such as mathematical education.

He once wrote a paper under a pseudonym derived from Kobayashi Issa, a famous Japanese haiku poet. The result is known as Issa's theorem in complex function theory.

Hironaka is married to Wakako Hironaka, a politician, and they have two children.

[edit] List of books available in English

Formal functions and formal imbeddings / by Heisuke Hironaka and Hideyuki Matsumura (1967)
On the characters $ν$ and $τ$ of singularities / by Heisuke Hironaka
Introduction to the theory of infinitely near singular points / Heisuke Hironaka (1974)
The theory of the maximal contact / José M. Aroca, Heisuke Hironaka and José L. Vicente (1975)
Desingularization theorems / Jose M. Aroca, Heisuke Hironaka and Jose L. Vicente (1977)
Geometric singularity theory / editors of the volume, Heisuke Hironaka, Stanisław Janeczko (2004)