|
Goro Shimura (1930 -), Japanese-American mathematician, and currently a
professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
Shimura was a colleague and a friend of Yutaka Taniyama. They wrote a
book (the first book treatment) on the complex multiplication of abelian
varieties, an area which in collaboration they had opened up.
Shimura then wrote a long series of important papers, extending the
phenomena found in the theory of complex multiplication and modular forms to
higher dimensions (amongst other results). This work (and other developments
it provoked) provided some of the 'raw data' later incorporated into the
Langlands program. It equally brought out the concept, in general, of
Shimura variety; which is the higher-dimensional equivalent of modular
curve. Even to state in general what a Shimura variety is (should be) is
quite a formidable task.
Shimura himself has described his approach as 'phenomenological': his
interest is in finding new types of interesting behaviour in the theory of
automorphic forms. He also argues for a 'romantic' approach, something he
finds lacking in the younger generation of mathematician. The central
'Shimura variety' concept has been tamed (by application of Lie group and
algebraic group theory, and the extraction of the concept 'parametrises
interesting family of Hodge structures' by reference to the algebraic
geometry theory of 'motives', which is still largely conjectural). In that
sense his work is now mainstream-for-Princeton; but this assimilation
(through Mumford, Deligne and others) hardly includes all of the content.
He is known to a wider public through the important Taniyama-Shimura
conjecture, which implied the famous Fermat's last theorem as a special
case. The conjecture was finally proven in 1999.
His hobby is shogi problems of extreme length.
|
