Kiyoshi Itō
| Kiyoshi Itō | |
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| Born | September 7, 1915 Hokusei, Mie, Honshū, Japan |
| Died | November 10, 2008 (aged 93)[1] Kyōto, Japan |
| Residence | Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Aarhus University Cornell University University of Kyoto |
| Alma mater | Imperial University Tokyo |
| Doctoral students | Masatoshi Fukushima Murali Rao Shinzo Watanabe |
| Known for | Itō calculus |
| Notable awards | Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1987), Gauss Prize (2006) |
Kiyoshi Itō (伊藤 清 Itō Kiyoshi, September 7, 1915 – 10 November 2008) was a Japanese mathematician. His major contribution to mathematics is now called Itō calculus. Its basic concept is the Itō integral, and among the most important results is Itō's lemma. The Itō calculus facilitates mathematical understanding of random events. His theory is widely applied in various fields, and is perhaps best known for its use in financial mathematics.[2]
Although the standard Hepburn romanization of his name is Itō, the spellings Itô (as in Kunrei-shiki romanization), Itoh, or Ito are often seen in the West as well.
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[edit] Biography
Itō was born in Hokusei (Inabe) in Mie Prefecture on the main island of Honshū. After high school he studied mathematics at the Imperial University Tokyo, from which he graduated at the age of 23. After that he started to work for the national statistical office, where he published two of his seminal works on probability and stochastic processes.
In 1945, he was awarded a Ph.D. for his work. Seven years later he became a professor at the University of Kyoto, where he remained until his retirement in 1979. In addition, he held professorships at University of Aarhus from 1966 to 1969, and Cornell University from 1969 to 1975. Itō was awarded the inaugural Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize in 2006 for his lifetime achievements. As he was unable to travel to Madrid, his youngest daughter, Junko Itō (a professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in phonology), received the Gauss Prize from the King of Spain on his behalf.
In October 2008, Itō was honored with Japan's Order of Culture; and an awards ceremony for the Order of Culture was held at the Imperial Palace.[3]
Itō wrote in Chinese, German, French and English.
Itō's formula was celebrated at a financial conference many years after he developed it. As a pure mathematician, Itō was bemused at all the fuss and claimed not to remember deriving the formula in the first place.
Itō died on November 10, 2008 in Kyoto, Japan. He was 93.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ "Renowned math wiz Ito, 93, dies", The Japan Times, November 15, 2008, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20081115a9.html
- ^ Lohr, Steve (November 23, 2008), "Kiyoshi Ito, 93, Mathematician Who Described Random Motion, Dies", The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/business/24ito.html?_r=1
- ^ "Donald Keene, 7 others win Order of Culture," Yomiuri Shimbun. October 29, 2008.
[edit] References
- Obituary
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Kiyoshi Itō", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Ito.html.
- Protter, Philip (June/July 2007), "The Work of Kyoshi Itō" (.PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society 54 (6): 744–745, http://www.ams.org/notices/200706/tx070600744p.pdf, retrieved 2007-09-20
[edit] External links
- 1915 births
- 2008 deaths
- Japanese mathematicians
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- 20th-century mathematicians
- Probability theorists
- Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates
- University of Tokyo alumni
- Kyoto University faculty
- Cornell University faculty
- Members of the French Academy of Sciences
- Researchers in stochastics
- Recipients of the Order of Culture
- Laureates of the Imperial Prize
