A lost mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa
Subtitle: the forgotten father of matroid theory
By: Hirokazu Nishimura and Susumu Kuroda, editors
Contributors: SpringerLink (Online service)
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Basel; Boston
Language: eng; ger
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9783764385736; 9783764385729
Subjects: Matroids
Other titles: Takeo Nakasawa :
Description: Matroid theory was invented in the middle of the 1930s by two mathematicians independently, namely, Hassler Whitney in the USA and Takeo Nakasawa in Japan. Whitney became famous, but Nakasawa remained anonymous until two decades ago. He left only four papers to the mathematical community, all of them written in the middle of the 1930s. It was a bad time to have lived in a country that had become as eccentric as possible. Just as Nazism became more and more flamboyant in Europe in the 1930s, Japan became more and more esoteric and fanatical in the same time period. This book explains the little that is known about Nakasawa’s personal life in a Japan that had, among other failures, lost control over its military. We do not know what forces caused him to be discharged from the Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences. His work was considered brilliant, his papers superb, if somewhat unconventional and mysterious in notation. We do know that, in the latter half of the 1930s, forced to give up his mathematical career, he chose to live as a bureaucrat in Manchuria, at that time a puppet state of Japan. He died in 1946 at Khavarovsk, at the age of 33, after one year of forced labor in Siberian and other USSR camps, without sufficient food or shelter to protect his health. This book contains his four papers in German and their English translations as well as some extended commentary on the history of Japan during those years. The book also contains 14 photos of him or his family. Although the veil of mystery surrounding Nakasawa’s life has only been partially lifted, the work presented in this book speaks eloquently of a tragic loss to the mathematical community.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.

Includes four papers by Takeo Nakasawa in German and their English translations.
Table of contents: title: The life of Takeo Nakasawa; title: South Manchurian Railway Company (1906-1945); title: The road to the Fifteen Years War (1931-1945); title: The Fifteen Years War (1931-1945); title: Mathematics around Takeo Nakasawa; title: Chronological tables; title: Works of Takeo Nakasawa; title: Zur Axiomatik der linearen Abhängigkeit I; title: Zur Axiomatik der linearen Abhängigkeit II; title: Zur Axiomatik der linearen Abhängigkeit III; title: Über die Abbildungskette vom Projektionsspektrum; title: On Axiomatics of linear dependence I : the B1-space; title: On Axiomatics of linear dependence II : the B2-space; title: On Axiomatics of linear dependence III; title: On Mapping sequences of a projective spectrum.