A lost mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa

Hirokazu Nishimura, Susumu Kuroda

Matroid theory was invented in the middle of the 1930s by two mathematicians independently, namely, Hassler Whitney in the USA and Takeo Nakasawa in Japan. Whitney became famous, but Nakasawa remained anonymous until two decades ago. He left only four papers to the mathematical community, all of them written in the middle of the 1930s. It was a bad time to have lived in a country that had become as eccentric as possible. Just as Nazism became more and more flamboyant in Europe in the 1930s, Japan became more and more esoteric and fanatical in the same time period. This book explains the little that is known about Nakasawa’s personal life in a Japan that had, among other failures, lost control over its military. We do not know what forces caused him to be discharged from the Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences. His work was considered brilliant, his papers superb, if somewhat...