Yutaka Taniyama

Yutaka Taniyama (1927-1958) was a Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. Born in Kisai, a town in Saitama, he was the sixth of eight children in a doctor's family and decided to become a mathematician after reading the work of Teiji Takagi. Illness interrupted his university studies for two years, and he graduated in 1950. He worked as an assistant and then as an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, which awarded him his doctorate in May 1958, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton offered him a position that year. His interests were in algebraic number theory and he was influenced by Andre Weil. His problems of 1955 form the basis of the conjecture that every elliptic curve over the rationals is a factor of the Jacobian of a modular function field. Refined with Goro Shimura, it became the modularity theorem, which Ken Ribet linked to Fermat's Last Theorem in 1986 and which was finally proved by 1999. Taniyama died in Tokyo in November 1958, aged thirty-one.