Masahiko Fujiwara

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Masahiko Fujiwara (Japanese: 藤原正彦 Fujiwara Masahiko; born July 9, 1943) is a Japanese mathematician, who is best known as an essayist.

He comes from a cultured family: his father Nitta Jiro and mother Tei Fujiwara were both popular authors. He began writing after a two-year position as associate professor at the University of Colorado, with a book Wakaki sugakusha no Amerika designed to explain American campus life to Japanese people. He also wrote about the University of Cambridge, after a year's visit (Harukanaru Kenburijji: Ichi sugakusha no Igirisu). In a popular book on mathematics, he categorized theorems as beautiful theorems or ugly theorems. He is also known in Japan for speaking out against government reforms in secondary education. He wrote The Dignity of a State, which according to Time Asia was the second best selling book in the first six months of 2006 in Japan [1]. In 2006 he published Yo ni mo utsukushii sugaku nyumon ("An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics") with the writer Ogawa Yoko: it is a dialogue between novelist and mathematician on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.