Kazuya Kato

Kazuya Kato, born on 17 January 1952, is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He grew up in Wakayama Prefecture, studied at the University of Tokyo, took his master's degree there in 1975 and his doctorate in 1980. He lectured at Tokyo University from 1982 and again from 1997 to 2001, taught at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1992, and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2009. His research spans the Galois theory of fields, Iwasawa theory, p-adic cohomology, L-functions, K-theory and Hodge theory, and he began the use of logarithmic structure to redefine Hodge structure. He received the 2005 Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy for research on arithmetic geometry and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. A special volume of Documenta Mathematica honored his fiftieth birthday, and he has written several books in Japanese, including one on Fermat's Last Theorem.