Takagi

Teiji Takagi

Born: 21 April 1875 in Kazuya Village (near Gifu), Japan
Died: 29 Feb 1960 in Tokyo, Japan

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Takagi graduated from Tokyo in 1897, then studied under Fuchs, Frobenius and Hilbert at Berlin and Göttingen from 1897 to 1900. He completed a doctorate in Tokyo in 1903 and he was made a professor there in 1904. He held this post until he retired in 1936.

On his return to Tokyo in 1903 Takagi proved a conjecture on abelian extensions of imaginary number fields made by Kronecker. Kronecker described this conjecture as the dearest dream of youth.

Takagi worked on class field theory, building on Heinrich Weber's work. He wrote two long important papers in 1920 and 1922. His 1920 paper introduced the Takagi class-field theory generalising Hilbert's class field.

In 1922 Siegel persuaded Artin to read the first of these papers and the significance was realised. It became the framework of algebraic number theory. Hasse included Takagi's theory in his treatise on class field theory a few years later.

Takagi's most important books are Introduction to analysis (1938) and Algebraic number theory (1948).

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. K Honda, Teiji Takagi : A Biography, Commentarii mathematica Universitatis Sancti Pauli 24 (1975), 141-167. 
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