Kunihiko Kodaira
Native spelling: 小平邦彦
1915–1997, Tokyo, Japan, Kōfu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan
Japanese mathematician — the first Japanese Fields Medallist — who applied harmonic integrals and sheaf cohomology to Kähler manifolds and algebraic varieties, proving the Kodaira vanishing and embedding theorems and classifying compact complex surfaces.
Kunihiko Kodaira graduated from the University of Tokyo in mathematics in 1938 and in physics in 1941. Working in wartime isolation, he mastered Hodge's theory of harmonic integrals and completed a 1949 doctoral thesis, 'Harmonic Fields in Riemannian Manifolds', that attracted the notice of Hermann Weyl and brought an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
At Princeton and the IAS during the 1950s, Kodaira combined harmonic forms with the new sheaf cohomology of Leray, Cartan, and Serre to prove the Kodaira vanishing theorem and the Kodaira embedding theorem (characterizing which compact Kähler manifolds are projective algebraic varieties), for which he received the Fields Medal in 1954. In a celebrated series of papers with Donald C. Spencer he then created the deformation theory of complex structures on compact manifolds.
In the 1960s Kodaira completed the classification of compact complex surfaces into rough classes, extending the classical Enriques–Italian classification beyond algebraic surfaces. After chairs at Johns Hopkins and Stanford he returned to the University of Tokyo in 1967, founding a prominent school of Japanese algebraic geometers, and was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1984.
Workplaces: University of Tokyo, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University
Japan