Kazuya Kato

Kazuya Kato (加藤 和也, Katō Kazuya, born on January 17, 1952) is a Japanese mathematician. He grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980. He was a professor at Tokyo University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyoto University. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2009.

He has fundamentally contributed to many parts of modern number theory and related parts of algebraic geometry. His first work was in the higher-dimensional generalisations of local class field theory using Milnor K-theory. It was then extended to higher global class field theory in which several of his papers were written jointly with Shuji Saito. He contributed to p-adic Hodge theory, logarithmic geometry (he was one of its creators together with Jean-Marc Fontaine and Luc Illusie), comparison conjectures, special values of zeta functions including the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and Bloch-Kato conjecture on Tamagawa numbers, Iwasawa theory, and many others.

A special volume of Documenta Mathematica was published in honor of his 50th birthday. Together with research papers written by leading number theorists and former students it contains Kato's song on Prime Numbers.

In 2005 Kato received the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy for "Research on Arithmetic Geometry".

Books

He published many books in Japanese, of which several have already been translated into English. He wrote a book on Fermat's last theorem and is also the author of the two volumes of the trilogy on Number Theory, which have been translated into English.