Kenkichi Iwasawa

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

Biography 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 the University of Tokyo, after which he entered graduate school at the same institution and became an assistant in the Department of Mathematics.

From 1967 until his retirement in 1986, Iwasawa served as Professor of Mathematics at Princeton.

Research Iwasawa is known for introducing what is now called Iwasawa theory, which developed from researches on cyclotomic fields from the later 1950s. Before that he worked on Lie groups and Lie algebras, introducing the general Iwasawa decomposition.

List of books available in English Lectures on p-adic L-functions / by Kenkichi Iwasawa (1972) Local class field theory / Kenkichi Iwasawa (1986) Algebraic functions / Kenkichi Iwasawa; translated by Goro Kato (1993)