A new mathematics award was instituted at the International Congress of Mathematicians being held at Madrid.
MADRID: Japan’s Kiyoshi Ito shared some of the limelight enjoyed by fellow mathematical genius Grigory Perelman on Tuesday when he won the Gauss prize for mathematics at an awards ceremony here.
Ill health meant the 90-year-old Ito could not receive the inaugural prize worth 10,000 euros (11,500 dollars) in person at the 25th annual International Congress of Mathematicians presided by Spanish King Juan Carlos.
Instead, his youngest daughter Junko, linguistics chair at the University of California in Santa Cruz, was on hand to pick it up from Sir John Ball, head of the International Mathematical Union hosting the congress.
Ball said he will soon travel to Kyoto to pay personal tribute to Ito, whose achievement was somewhat overshadowed by the publicity surrounding Russian mathematician Perelman’s decision to reject the mathematics world’s equivalent of the Nobel prize.
A panel of judges including former Australian Mathematical Society present Ian Sloan found Ito had made a major contribution to 20th Century applied mathematics and credited him with laying the foundations of the theory of stochastic differential equations and stochastic analysis.
Stochastics involves creating models of study around random events which can happen at any time.
Their practical application is highly diverse, ranging from population dynamics to engineering filtering and, of particular interest to financial analysts, probabilities of financial risk.
The idea underpins market instruments such as options and futures, whereby prices are calculated according to stochastic analysis. In biology, the theory allows biologists to assess the probability of a gene dominating a species.
Ito, born on September 7, 1915 in Hokusei-cho, Mie prefecture, central southern Japan, was professor at the University of Kyoto until his retirement in 1979.
He also held a string of lectureships at institutions as august as Cornell and Princeton, where he began his US career in 1954.
After graduating from the Imperial University, Tokyo, Ito went on to work for the national statistical office, publishing seminal works on theories of probability and stochastics. He was awarded a PhD in 1945.
“What he’s been involved in is the purest of pure mathematics and this is a deserved tribute to him,” Dr Alf van der Poorten, emeritus professor of mathematics at the Sydney Centre for Number Theory Research, said.
The Gauss prize, awarded by the International Mathematical Union and the German Mathematical Union, is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who was known as the “prince of mathematicians” owing to contributions across a wide range of fields from number theory and differential geometry to astronomy.
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