Hidehiko Yamabe

Hidehiko Yamabe (1923 to 1960) was a Japanese mathematician who made important contributions to the theory of Lie groups and to differential geometry before his death at the age of 37. Born in Ashiya near Osaka and educated at the University of Tokyo, he worked at Osaka University and then at Princeton as assistant to Deane Montgomery, where two papers of 1953 in the Annals of Mathematics gave a final answer to Hilbert's fifth problem. He later taught at the University of Minnesota and at Northwestern University, and his interests moved toward differential equations and geometry, leading to his 1960 paper on a deformation of Riemannian structures on compact manifolds. With David Pope he also published a computational approach to the four colour problem. A memorial lecture and, from 2002, a memorial symposium carry his name.