Kazuya Kato

Kato Kazuya (male, born on January 17, 1952) is a mathematician. He grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan and is currently a professor at Kyoto University. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980.

He is one of the greatest living number theorists. He contributed to many parts of modern number theory and related parts of algebraic geometry, sometimes reshaping them via his influential works. His first work was in the higher-dimensional generalisations of local class field theory, and its globalisation. He contributed to higher ramification theory, p-adic Hodge theory, logarithmic geometry (he was one of its creators together with Fontaine and Illusie), comparison conjectures, special values of zeta functions including the Bloch-Kato conjecture on Tamagawa numbers, Iwasawa theory, Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and many others.

He has established one of the most successful and powerful schools in number theory.

He is a renowned speaker with a unique style.

Famous rumours

He hears the prime numbers sing. Its text is available from http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/documenta/vol-kato/02prime.dm.pdf
He invented a prime number dance
His advisor is Ihara
He is the advisor of Takeshi Saito, Masato Kurihara, and more than 20 other Japanese mathematicians

Biography

1975 - BA from Tokyo University
1977 - MA from Tokyo U. Becomes teaching assistant.
1980 - PhD from Tokyo U.
1982 - becomes lecturer at Tokyo U.
1984 - assistant prof at Tokyo U.
1988 - awarded the spring medal of the Japanese Math Society for his work on higher dimensional H class field theory
1990 - full professor at Tokyo U
1992 - moves to Tokyo Institute of Technology
1995 - Inoue Award for his work on number theory connected with p-adics methods in algebraic manifolds
1997 - moves back to Tokyo U.
2001 - moves to Kyoto U.
2002 - Asahi newspaper award for his work on number theory
2005 - Japan Gakushiin Award for his work on number theory and arithmetic geometry.

Books

He wrote a book on Fermat's last theorem and is also the author of the two volumes of the famous trilogy on Number Theory, of which the first has been translated into English and is entitled "Fermat's Dream"