Goro Shimura
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Goro Shimura |
Goro Shimura (
Japanese: 志村 "郎
Shimura Gorō; born
1930) is a
Japanese
mathematician, and currently a
professor emeritus of
mathematics (former Michael Henry Strater Chair) at
Princeton University.
Shimura was a colleague and a friend of
Yutaka Taniyama. They wrote a book (the first book treatment) on the
complex multiplication of abelian varieties, an area which in collaboration they had opened up.
Shimura then wrote a long series of major papers, extending the phenomena found in the theory of complex multiplication and
modular forms to higher dimensions (amongst other results). This work (and other developments it provoked) provided some of the 'raw data' later incorporated into the
Langlands program. It equally brought out the concept, in general, of
Shimura variety; which is the higher-dimensional equivalent of
modular curve. Even to state in general what a Shimura variety is quite a formidable task: they bear, roughly speaking, the same relation to general
Hodge structures as modular curves do to
elliptic curves.
Shimura himself has described his approach as 'phenomenological': his interest is in finding new types of interesting behaviour in the theory of automorphic forms. He also argues for a 'romantic' approach, something he finds lacking in the younger generation of mathematician. The central 'Shimura variety' concept has been tamed (by application of
Lie group and
algebraic group theory, and the extraction of the concept 'parametrises interesting family of Hodge structures' by reference to the
algebraic geometry theory of '
motives', which is still largely conjectural). In that sense his work is now mainstream-for-Princeton; but this assimilation (through
David Mumford,
Pierre Deligne and others) hardly includes all of the content.
He is known to a wider public through the important
Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which implied the famous
Fermat's last theorem as a special case. The conjecture was finally proven in
1999.
Among many honors and awards, Shimura received the Cole Prize for number theory in 1976 and the Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1996, both from the
American Mathematical Society.
His hobby is
shogi problems of extreme length.
