Mikio Sato

Mikio Sato was a Japanese mathematician known for founding the fields of algebraic analysis, hyperfunctions and holonomic quantum fields, born in Tokyo on 18 April 1928. He studied at the University of Tokyo, receiving his BSc in 1952 and his PhD under Shokichi Iyanaga in 1963. He was a professor at Osaka University and the University of Tokyo before moving in 1970 to the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences attached to Kyoto University, of which he was director from 1987 to 1991. His disciples, including Masaki Kashiwara, Takahiro Kawai, Tetsuji Miwa and Michio Jimbo, have been called the Sato School. He was known for innovative work on prehomogeneous vector spaces and Bernstein-Sato polynomials and particularly for his hyperfunction theory, and he was elected a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He died at home in Kyoto on 9 January 2023, aged 94.