Masaki Kashiwara

Masaki Kashiwara is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study, born in Yuki, Ibaraki, on January 30, 1947. One of his early fascinations was the tsurukamezan problem, which asks the number of cranes and turtles given a set number of legs and heads. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of Tokyo, earning a bachelor degree in mathematics in 1969 and a master degree in 1971, where he was a student of Mikio Sato and wrote a master thesis that laid the foundations for the study of D-modules. He continued under Sato at Kyoto University, earning his doctorate in 1974. He is known for contributions to algebraic analysis, microlocal analysis, D-module theory, Hodge theory, sheaf theory and representation theory, and in 2025 he was awarded the Abel Prize, the first recipient from Japan.