Heisuke Hironaka

Heisuke Hironaka
Born	9 April 1931 (1931-04-09) Yuu-chō, Kuga-Gun, Yamaguchi (modern-day Iwakuni, Yamaguchi)
Nationality	Japanese
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Harvard University Columbia University Seoul National University
Alma mater	Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Oscar Zariski
Doctoral students	William Haboush Allen Tannenbaum Bernard Teissier
Notable awards	Fields Medal (1970)

Heisuke Hironaka (広中 平祐, Hironaka Heisuke, born 9 April 1931) is a Japanese mathematician. He once failed the entrance examination for Hiroshima University in Japan, but after one year he passed the entrance examination for Kyoto University in Japan. 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 algebraic variety can be replaced by (more precisely is birationally equivalent to) a similar variety 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 is also a professor of mathematics at Seoul National University in South Korea. He has been active in raising funds for causes such as mathematical education. He is president of the University of Creation; Art, Music & Social Work, a private university in Takasaki, Gunma, Japan.

He once wrote a paper under a pseudonym derived from Kobayashi Issa, a famous Japanese haiku poet.^{[citation needed]} 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.

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)

External links

• Heisuke Hironaka at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Heisuke Hironaka", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hironaka.html .
• Jackson, Allyn; Interview with Heisuke Hironaka; Notices of the American Mathematical Society; vol. 52, no. 9 (October 2005).