Mikio Sato

was a Japanese mathematician known for founding the fields of algebraic analysis, hyperfunctions, and holonomic quantum fields. He was a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto.

Biography Born in Tokyo on 18 April 1928, Sato studied at the University of Tokyo, receiving his BSc in 1952 and PhD under Shokichi Iyanaga in 1963. He was a professor at Osaka University and the University of Tokyo before moving to the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) attached to Kyoto University in 1970.

Sato died at home in Kyoto on 9 January 2023, aged 94. Part of Sato's hyperfunction theory is the modern theory of holonomic systems: PDEs overdetermined to the point of having finite-dimensional spaces of solutions (algebraic analysis).

In theoretical physics, Sato wrote a series of papers in the 1970s with Michio Jimbo and Tetsuji Miwa that developed the theory of holonomic quantum fields.

Pierre Schapira remarked, "Looking back, 40 years later, we realize that Sato's approach to mathematics is not so different from that of Grothendieck, that Sato did have the incredible temerity to treat analysis as algebraic geometry and was also able to build the algebraic and geometric tools adapted to his problems."

Awards and honours Sato received the 1969 Asahi Prize of Science, the 1976 Japan Academy Prize, the 1984 Person of Cultural Merits award of the Japanese Education Ministry, the 1997 Schock Prize, and the 2002–2003 Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

Sato was a plenary speaker at the 1983 International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw. He was elected a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.