Kazuya Kato (加藤 和也, Katō Kazuya, born on January 17, 1952) is a Japanese mathematician who works at the University of Chicago and specializes in number theory and arithmetic geometry.

Early life and education

Kazuya Kato grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980.^[1]

Career

Kato was a professor at Tokyo University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyoto University. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2009.^[2]

A special volume of Documenta Mathematica was published in honor of his 50th birthday, together with research papers written by leading number theorists and former students it contains Kato's song on Prime Numbers.^[3]

Research

Kato's first work was in the higher-dimensional generalisations of local class field theory using algebraic K-theory. His theory was then extended to higher global class field theory in which several of his papers were written jointly with Shuji Saito.

He contributed to various other areas such as p-adic Hodge theory, logarithmic geometry (he was one of its creators together with Jean-Marc Fontaine and Luc Illusie), comparison conjectures, special values of zeta functions including applications to the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, the Bloch-Kato conjecture on Tamagawa numbers, and Iwasawa theory.

Awards and honors

In 2005, Kato received the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy for "Research on Arithmetic Geometry".^[4]

Books

Kato has published several books in Japanese, of which some have already been translated into English.

He wrote a book on Fermat's Last Theorem and is also the coauthor of two volumes of the trilogy on Number Theory, which have been translated into English.^[5]