Kunihiko Kodaira

Kunihiko Kodaira was a Japanese mathematician, born in Tokyo on 16 March 1915 and died on 26 July 1997, known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry and the theory of complex manifolds and as the founder of the Japanese school of algebraic geometers. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1954, the first Japanese national to receive the honour. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1938 and obtained his PhD there in 1949 with a thesis entitled Harmonic fields in Riemannian manifolds, then travelled to the Institute for Advanced Study at the invitation of Hermann Weyl and became a professor at Princeton University in 1955. He applied Hodge theory and sheaf theory to algebraic geometry, wrote with Donald C. Spencer on the deformation theory of complex structures on manifolds, and worked on the classification of algebraic surfaces.