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Field name	Details
Dewey Class	510.9
Title	A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa (EB) : The Forgotten Father of Matroid Theory / edited by Hirokazu Nishimura, Susumu Kuroda.
Author	Nishimura, Hirokazu
Added Personal Name	Kuroda, Susumu editor.
Other name(s)	SpringerLink (Online service)
Publication	Basel : : Birkhäuser , 2009.
Physical Details	: online resource.
ISBN	9783764385736
Summary Note	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 Nakasawaâs 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 unconventional and mysterious in notation. We do know that, in the latter half of the 1930s, forced to give up his mathematical career, he chose to live as a bureaucrat in Manchuria, at that time a puppet state of Japan. He died in 1946 at Khavarovsk, at the age of 33, after one year of forced labor in Siberian and other USSR camps, without sufficient food or shelter to protect his health. This book contains his four papers in German and their English translations as well as some extended commentary on the history of Japan during those years. The book also contains 14 photos of him or his family. Although the veil of mystery surrounding Nakasawaâs life has only been partially lifted, the work presented in this book speaks eloquently of a tragic loss to the mathematical community.:
Contents note	From the contents: Preface -- The Life of Takeo Nakasawa -- South Manchurian Railway Company -- The Road to the Fifteen Years War (1931-1945) -- The Fifteen Years War (1931-1945) -- Mathematics around Takeo Nakasawa -- Chronoloical Tables -- Works of Nakasawa: Zur Axiomatik der linearen AbhÃ¤ngigkeit. I.-III -- Ãber die Abbildungskette vom Projektionsspektrum -- English translations.
System details note	Online access to this digital book is restricted to subscription institutions through IP address (only for SISSA internal users)
Internet Site	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8573-6
Links to Related Works	Subject References: History of mathematics . Mathematics . Mathematics - History . Authors: Kuroda, Susumu . Nishimura, Hirokazu . Corporate Authors: SpringerLink (Online service) . Classification: 510.9 .

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A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa: The Forgotten Father of Matroid Theory

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