Yozo Matsushima

Yozo Matsushima (Japanese松 岛 与 三, born February 21, 1921 in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, † April 9, 1983 in Osaka ) was a Japanese mathematician.

Life

Matsushima studied at the University of Osaka, where he was a pupil of Kenjiro Shoda. In 1942 he graduated and became an assistant at the Mathematical Institute of the then newly founded University of Nagoya. He worked on Lie algebras and refuted here a conjecture of Hans Julius Zassenhaus and proved some of Claude Chevalleys results independent of it, because he did not know whose publication resulting from the war period. More results could appear in the postwar years until 1950 due to publishing problems in Japan. Beginning of the 1950s he worked on pseudo groups and systems of differential forms. One of his students was then Kuranishi Masatake. In 1953, he received a full professorship at the University of Nagoya and in the fall of 1953 visited him Claude Chevalley. The following year, he said his visit to France (Strasbourg, Paris). Among other things, he presented his results on the classification of real Lie algebras in the seminar by Charles Ehresmann in Strasbourg in 1955 and held a lecture on Lie pseudo- groups in the Bourbaki seminar in Paris. In 1960, he became the successor of Kenjiro Shoda Professor of Algebra at the University of Osaka. He turned now increasingly the differential geometry and published on the cohomology of locally symmetric spaces some with Shingo Murakami. In 1962 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He organized in 1965 with Kentaro Yano and Katsumi Nomizu a joint Japanese- American Seminar on differential geometry in Kyoto and 1965/66 he was a visiting professor at the University of Grenoble. In 1966 he became a professor at the University of Notre Dame. In 1980 he returned to Japan and was once a professor at Osaka. In 1983, he died of pneumonia.

He dealt with Lie groups and differential geometry ( in complexes ) as well as related fields such as discrete groups, unitary representations and functions of several complex variables.

In 1962 he was awarded the Asahi Prize for his work on continuous groups ( Lie groups ). From 1967 he was co-editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry.