Kato's conjecture is a mathematical problem named after mathematician Tosio Kato, of the University of California, Berkeley. Kato initially posed the problem in 1953.
Kato asked whether the square root of certain elliptic operators, defined via functional calculus, are analytic.
The problem remained unresolved for nearly a half-century, until it was jointly solved in 2001 by Pascal Auscher, Steve Hofmann, Michael Lacey, Alan McIntosh, and Philippe Tchamitchian. The solution was published in 2002 in the Annals of Mathematics journal.