Katsumi Nomizu
| Katsumi Nomizu | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 1, 1924 Osaka, Japan |
| Died |
November 5, 2008 Providence, Rhode Island |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Shiing-Shen Chern |
| Known for |
Kulkarni-Nomizu product Foundations of Differential Geometry |
Katsumi Nomizu (野水 克己) was a Japanese-American mathematician. Nomizu was born in Osaka, Japan on the first day of December, 1924. He studied mathematics at Osaka University, graduating in 1947 with a master of science degree. He did postgraduate study at the Sorbonne and met Kimiko aboard ship when returning. Katsumi and Kimiko married and raised four children: Naomi, Yvonne, Simone, and Raymond.
Nomizu continued his mathematical studies at University of Chicago with Shiing-Shen Chern. In 1953 he presented his thesis "Invariant affine connections on homogeneous spaces", which signaled his dedication to affine differential geometry. Returning to Japan, he studied at Nagoya University, obtaining doctor of science in 1955. Notes for his course "Lie Groups and Differential Geometry"[1] were published by Mathematical Society of Japan in 1956. Nomizu taught at the Catholic University in Osaka in 1958.
In 1960 he began his thirty-five-year career with Brown University, first as associate professor, becoming full professor in 1963. He particularly enjoyed teaching freshmen calculus. With Shoshichi Kobayashi he published the first volume of Foundations of Differential Geometry in 1963.[2] Nomizu was a driving force behind a joint US-Japan seminar on differential geometry in Kyoto in 1965. He published Fundamentals of Linear Algebra[3] in 1966, and a second edition in 1979.
In his teaching career he helped 13 students obtain a Ph.D. and 3 a master’s degree. For his seventieth birthday a celebration was held at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He served as editor of a collection of papers on number theory and algebraic geometry[4] published by the American Mathematical Society in 1996.
Katsumi Nomizu died November 5, 2008, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was known for his "fierce intellect, wry humor, gentle soul".
Awards
- 1991 Humboldt Prize
- 1994 Honorary Socio Corrispondanti, Accademia Peloriana dei Pericolanti, Messina, Italy
- 1997 Wilhelm Blaschke medal
References
- ↑ A. Nijenhuis (1957) Review of Lie Groups and Differential Geometry from Mathematical Reviews
- ↑ Hermann, Robert (1964). "Review: Foundations of differential geometry, by S. Kobayashi and K. Nomizu". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 70 (2): 232–235.
- ↑ R.F. Rinehart (1969) Review of Fundamentals of Linear Algebra from Mathematical Reviews
- ↑ Katsumi Nomizu (1996) Selected papers in number theory and algebraic geometry by Jun-ichi Igusa, Kumiko Nishioka, Kazuya Kato, Masayoshi Miyonishi, and Tadoa Oda, American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-0-8218-0445-2
- "In Memory of Katsumi Nomizu" (2009) Results in Mathematics 56:1,2.