Kenji Fukaya

Kenji Fukaya (Japanese: 深谷賢治, Fukaya Kenji) is a Japanese mathematician known for his work in symplectic geometry and Riemannian geometry.

His many fundamental contributions to mathematics include the discovery of the Fukaya category.

He is a permanent faculty member at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University.

Fukaya was both an undergraduate and a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Tokyo, receiving his BA in 1981, and his PhD in 1986.

In 1987, he joined the University of Tokyo faculty as an associate professor.

Fukaya was awarded the Japanese Mathematical Society's Geometry Prize in 1989 and Spring Prize in 1994.

Fukaya was an invited speaker at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, where he gave a talk entitled, Collapsing Riemannian Manifolds and its Applications.

He then moved to Kyoto University as a full professor in 1994.

He also received the Inoue Prize in 2002, the Japan Academy Prize in 2003, the Asahi Prize in 2009, and the Fujihara Award in 2012.

He has served on the governing board of the Japanese Mathematical Society and on the Mathematical Committee of the Science Council of Japan.

In 2013, he then moved to the United States in order to join the faculty of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook.

The Fukaya category, meaning the A_\infty category of whose objects are Lagrangian submanifolds of a given symplectic manifold, is named after him, and is intimately related to Floer homology.

Other contributions to symplectic geometry include his proof (with Kaoru Ono) of a weak version of the Arnold conjecture and a construction of general Gromov-Witten invariants.

His many other mathematical contributions include important theorems in Riemannian geometry and work on physics-related topics such as gauge theory and mirror symmetry.