Shizuo Kakutani

Shizuo Kakutani (Japanese角 谷 静 夫, Shizuo Kakutani, born August 28, 1911 in Osaka Prefecture, † August 17 2004 in New Haven, Connecticut ) was a Japanese-American mathematician.

Kakutani visited the Tohoku University, there Tatsujiro Shimizu was his supervisor. Earlier in his career he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study at the invitation of Hermann Weyl. During his stay he met John von Neumann.

During the Second World War Kakutani taught at the University of Osaka. He returned in 1948 to the Institute for Advanced Study and got out of Yale in 1949 a professorship, which he held until his retirement in 1982.

The Kakutani fixed point theorem is a generalization of Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Its most important application is the proof of the existence of the Nash equilibrium in game theory.

In 1950 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) ( Ergodic theory ).

His doctoral counts Alexandra Bellow (Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea ).

The literary critic Michiko Kakutani (* 1955) is his daughter.