A Group of Mathematicians

A Group of Mathematicians 

Tokyo. 1970 

By  NOGUCHI Hiroshi

TANAKA Akio

Yesterday read over NOGUCHI Hiroshi’s A Group of Mathematicians, Tokyo, 1970. The book begins the first chapter from the seminar of Karl Menger (1902-1985)  at Wien in 1930s. The presentators were Heinrich Tietze and Herbert Seifert (1907-1996). There TERASAKA (pseudonym) from Japan heard them, that became friendly with Seifert after his presentation. Seifert spoke with an accent of Dresden.

Tietze spoke with the title ” On the embedding of n-dimensional distance space”. Seifelt’s theme at the seminar was the connection between geometry and algebra. Thus the book opens the curtain of topology’s development in the twentieth century. The second chapter describes the meeting at Asakusa, Tokyo in 1935, where young mathematicians in Japan conversed the new mathematics trend in Europe mainly by NAKAMURA ( pseudonym) who went to Swiss to study algebraic topology from Heinz Hoph (1894-1971). The author NOGUCHI writes, ” Thus, the history of algebraic topology in Japan started at this night.”

The book has eight chapters and the last chapter describes “the third generation” young topologists emerged in 1960s. KOMATSU (pseudonym) remember the past good days that opened the tiny  flower of homology, and the next all was destroyed by the second world war and now Japanese young mathematicians are studying under Sariban, Robion Kirby, Laurent Siebemann and John Milnor at Princeton in 1969.

Tokyo
11 January 2013

Sekinan Research Field of Language