Heisuke Hironaka
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Heisuke Hironaka (広中 平祐 Hironaka Heisuke, born April 9, 1931) is a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Oscar Zariski together with other famous mathematicians like David Mumford and Michael Artin.
He is celebrated for proving in 1964 that singularities of algebraic varieties admit resolutions in characteristic zero. This means that any projective variety can be replaced by a similar one (i.e. birationally equivalent) which has no singularities. For this theorem he won the Fields Medal in 1970. He was the second Japanese mathematician who won this prize. The first one was Kunihiko Kodaira in 1950's. Shigefumi Mori became the third Japanese Fields medalist in 1990. All three of them were studying algebraic geometry.
He was for many years a professor of mathematics at Harvard but currently lives in Japan where he is greatly respected and influential. He has been active in raising funds for causes such as mathematical education.
Trivia: He once wrote a paper under a pseudonym named after Kobayashi Issa, a famous Japanese haiku poet. The result is known as Issa's theorem in complex function theory.
External links:
- Hironaka biography (http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hironaka.html)ja:広中平祐