Up for auction "Algebraic Number Theory" Kenkichi Iwasawa Signed 8X10 Album Page. 

ES-4445

Kenkichi Iwasawa (岩澤 健吉 Iwasawa Kenkichi, September

11, 1917 – October 26, 1998) was a Japanese mathematician who is known for his influence on algebraic number theory. Iwasawa

was born in Shinshuku-mura,

a town near Kiryū, in Gunma Prefecture. He attended elementary school there, but later moved to Tokyo to

attend Musashi High

School. From 1937 to 1940 Iwasawa studied as an undergraduate at Tokyo Imperial University,

after which he entered graduate school at University of Tokyo and became an

assistant in the Department of Mathematics. In 1945 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree.

However, this same year Iwasawa became sick with pleurisy, and was unable to return to his position at the

university until April 1947. From 1949 to 1955 he worked as Assistant Professor

at Tokyo University. In 1950, Iwasawa was invited to Cambridge, Massachusetts to

give a lecture at the International

Congress of Mathematicians on his method to study Dedekind zeta

functions using integration over ideles and

duality of adeles; this method was also independently obtained

by John Tate and it is sometimes called Tate's thesis or the Iwasawa–Tate theory. Iwasawa spent

the next two years at Institute for Advanced

Study in Princeton, and in Spring

of 1952 was offered a job at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, where he worked until 1967. From 1967 until

his retirement in 1986, Iwasawa served as Professor of Mathematics at

Princeton. He returned to Tokyo with his wife in 1987. Iwasawa is perhaps best

known for introducing what is now called Iwasawa theory, which developed from researches on cyclotomic fields from the later parts of the 1950s. Before

that he worked on Lie groups and Lie algebras, introducing the general Iwasawa decomposition. Among

Iwasawa's most famous students are Robert F. Coleman, Ralph Greenberg, Gustave Solomon, Larry Washington, and Eugene M. Luks.