Shigefumi Mori

Shigefumi Mori (Japanese森 重 文Mori Shigefumi; born February 23, 1951 in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal for his work in algebraic geometry.

Mori graduated from Kyoto University, where in 1975 he received his master's degree. In 1978 he received his doctorate under Masayoshi Nagata his dissertation on special endomorphism rings of abelian varieties. In 1980 he moved to the University of his native city of Nagoya, where he became a full professor in 1988. In 1990 he went back to the University of Kyoto. He also held several visiting professorships in the United States, among others, from 1980 to 1981 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

He proved in 1978 Hartshorne 's conjecture on algebraic varieties with " ample bundle", namely that projective varieties are the only complete algebraic varieties with " ample " tangent vector spaces ( bundles ).

Thereafter he devoted himself to classification of three-dimensional algebraic varieties, after the classification of two-dimensional algebraic varieties in particular by the Italian (Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques, Francesco Severi ) and Russian school had already reached a certain age. In 1981, he made ​​a beginning in the classification of 3-dimensional Fano varieties of type. The work on the classification in the general three-dimensional case accomplished he and some employees in the 1980s, among other things, the introduction of new techniques ( flips, flops ). In 1990 he was awarded the Fields Medal at the ICM in Kyoto ( Plenary Lecture: birational classification of algebraic 3- folds ).

Writings

• Flip theorem and the existence of minimal models for 3- folds, Journal of the AMS 1, 1988, pp. 117-253