Teiji Takagi

Teiji Takagi was a Japanese mathematician, born on 21 April 1875 in Kazuya Village near Gifu, who worked on class field theory building on the work of Heinrich Weber. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1897 and the next year was one of twelve Japanese students chosen to study abroad. On his return to Tokyo in 1903 he proved a conjecture of Kronecker on abelian extensions of imaginary number fields, which Kronecker had called the dearest dream of youth. He was a full professor at Tokyo University from 1904 until he retired in 1936. His most important paper, written in 1920, introduced what is called Takagi class field theory, generalising the class field of Hilbert. He died in Tokyo on 29 February 1960.