Kodaira Kunihiko Prize

Kodaira Kunihiko Prize

The Kodaira Kunihiko Prize acknowledges members of MSJ who have made world-class academic achievements over their lifetime. It was initiated in 2019 to honour the legacy and donations of Mr. Takao Okada, who wished to raise the standard of mathematics in Japan further. The award is presented to four recipients (in principle) once every four years.

The prize is named after Kunihiko Kodaira (1915-1997), one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and the founder of the theory of complex manifolds. His work has enormously impacted a wide range of fields, such as algebraic geometry, complex function theory, and mathematical physics.

Kodaira began his research career in harmonic analysis during the difficult years of the Pacific War. Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) was astonished by his work and offered him a research fellow position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1949. In 1954, he received the Fields Medal as the first Japanese national for significant results in the theory of harmonic integrals and numerous applications to algebraic varieties, such as the Kodaira vanishing theorem.

He also developed the deformation theory of complex structures and the classification theory of complex surfaces by applying harmonic analysis to the cohomology theory of sheaves, the state-of-the-art method back then.

Kodaira returned to his position at his alma mater, the University of Tokyo, in 1968. He trained many students until his retirement in 1975, which helped Japan become a major center in algebraic geometry and complex manifold theory. In later years, he stressed the importance of mathematics education and wrote excellent textbooks and intriguing essays with humour that contributed to popularizing mathematics.

The 2nd Kodaira Kunihiko Prize Masatoshi FUKUSHIMA (Professor Emeritus, Osaka University) Dirichlet form methods in stochastic analysis Yoshikazu GIGA (Project Professor, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Tokyo / Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo / Professor Emeritus, Hokkaido Univeristy) Mathematical analysis of nonlinear problems Yasutaka IHARA (Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo / Professor Emeritus, Kyoto University) Study on number theory Shigeyuki MORITA (Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo / Professor Emeritus, Tokyo Institute of Technology) Geometry of characteristic classes

The 1st Kodaira Kunihiko Prize Hiroshi FUJITA (Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo) Study of functional analytic methods in nonlinear partial differential equations Hitoshi ISHII (Research Fellow, Tsuda University / Professor Emeritus, Waseda University) Viscosity solution theory for fully nonlinear partial differential equations Toshikazu SUNADA (Professor, Meiji University / Professor Emeritus, Tohoku University) Study on geometric analysis and related fields Shigefumi MORI (Director-General, Distinguished Professor, Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study) Birational classification of algebraic varieties