Kunihiko Kodaira

Mathematics, physics and wartime disruption

Kodaira completed mathematics at Tokyo Imperial University in 1938 and physics in 1941. Shokichi Iyanaga influenced his early development. War disrupted both family life and academic contact, but he resumed teaching and research in postwar Tokyo.

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A paper that opened an international career

His 1949 doctorate concerned harmonic fields on Riemannian manifolds. Hermann Weyl brought him to the Institute for Advanced Study that year. Donald Spencer invited him to lecture at Princeton; their collaboration developed deformation theory for complex manifolds.

The problem was how a geometric structure could vary, and which structures resisted variation. Analytic techniques became tools for geometric questions rather than a separate branch of his career.

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Research across universities

After Princeton, he worked at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, returning to the University of Tokyo in 1967. Spencer’s memoir describes their collaboration and Kodaira’s later concentration on compact complex surfaces.

The 1954 Fields Medal recognised his work during the growth of modern complex algebraic geometry. It was followed by years of research and supervision, rather than marking the end of his mathematical contribution.

Sources for this section: [2]

A return to teaching and exposition

Kodaira served as Tokyo’s science dean in 1971–1973 and retired from the university in 1975. He then taught at Gakushuin for ten years and wrote school and university textbooks. Declining health limited his final years; he died in 1997.

Research memoirs emphasise the mathematician, while his later educational work reveals another way of sustaining the subject: explaining it to students who would not become specialists.

Sources for this section: [1]