5/25/2019 Goro Shimura, a 'giant' of number theory, dies at 89

Goro Shimura, a ‘giant’ of number theory, dies at 89

Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications
May 8, 2019 3:31 p.m .

Goro Shimura, Princeton’s Michael Henry Strater University Professor of

Mathematics, Emeritus, died on Friday, May 3, in Princeton, New Jersey.
He was 89.

“Goro Shimura was a major research mathematician, creative and original and
inspiring,” said Robert Gunning, a fellow math professor. “He was a quiet presence
around the department and we will miss him deeply.”

He was “a true giant in the fields of modern number theory, arithmetic geometry
and automorphic forms, whose pioneering papers and ideas have shaped these
fields in unmistakable and enduring ways,” said Jonathan Hanke, a visiting
lecturer in mathematics at Princeton who was Shimura’s last graduate student.
“He established many deep and surprising connections between these fields and
often seeded research directions with his own pioneering and foundational work.”

The Shimura varieties, generalizing elliptic functions with complex multiplication,

are at the center of geometric theory, said Peter Sarnak, Princeton’s Eugene
Higgins Professor of Mathematics. “Fundamental mathematical truths have long
shelf lives, and this is especially true for Shimura’s works,” Sarnak said. Goro Shim ura
Photo b y Orren Jack Turner, 1964
Shimura once said that his guiding philosophy was that many geometric objects
have a natural way of being presented other than the conventional mathematical
expressions. This thinking led him to solve many longstanding problems and raise new areas of inquiry. In 1964, he
formulated an important conjecture, building on the work of his friend Yutaka Taniyama, that suggested a surprising relation
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5/25/2019 between elliptic and modular curves. Goro Shimura, a 'giant' of number theory, dies at 89

That conjecture turned out to be key to then-Princetonian Andrew Wiles’ solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, as several
Princeton professors discussed in a BBC documentary (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074rxx) on the subject
(transcript available here (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2414proof.html)).

Fermat’s problem “had always had this great symbolic attraction for number theorists, but it wasn’t important,” said Wiles
at the time. But when he discovered its link to Shimura’s work, “which we all agree is tremendously important … the
romantic appeal of Fermat’s Last Theorem was linked to the genuine mathematical importance of the Taniyama-Shimura
conjecture,” Wiles said.

“Shimura was a man of the highest standards for research as well as for life in general,” Gunning said. “I remember many
discussions of possible appointments to the Princeton mathematics department in which a major question was whether
the appointment was up to Shimura’s standards.”

Hanke echoed those sentiments: “He was a tireless champion of the highest standards of professional conduct for
research papers and mathematical communication — a truly principled person of integrity who cared deeply about the
literature, academia and the impact that compromising standards could have on the next generation of young researchers,”
he said. “While I have known many Fields medalists (and co-authored several papers with one), it is the highest privilege of
my academic life to have been his student and to grow under the tutelage of a master like Goro Shimura. I have never met
his equal and deeply treasure the time we have spent together — as adviser, then colleague and later as a friend.”

Born Feb. 23, 1930, in Hamamatsu, Japan, Shimura studied at the University of
Tokyo, obtaining his B.A. in 1952 and D.Sc. in 1958. He taught at the University of
Tokyo and Osaka University before coming to Princeton in 1962 as a visiting
professor and then joining the regular faculty in 1964. He transferred to emeritus
status in 1999.

Many of Shimura’s advisees have become leading figures in their fields. “I was his
last graduate student, which made our mathematical levels maximally
mismatched — he was at the height of a monumental career in number theory
and I was a beginning graduate student,” said Hanke, a 1999 graduate alumnus.
“He advised me to ‘find my own problems’ — difficult advice to follow, but clearly
what led him to his greatness. He was willing to explore questions regardless of
whether there was a pre-existing formalism there to support him.”

Goro Shim ura

Photo courtesy of Haru Shim ura
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5/25/2019 Among many honors and awards,GoroShimura
Shimura, a received a Guggenheim
'giant' of number theory, dies at Fellowship
89 in
1979, the Cole Prize for number theory in 1976, the Asahi Prize in 1991 and the
Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1996. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the
Mathematical Society of Japan, and he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study five times. He wrote
more than 100 scholarly papers and books, including his 2008 autobiography, “The Map of My Life,” and a coffee-table
book about the Imari porcelain that he spent 30 years collecting: “The Story of Imari: The Symbols and Mysteries of
Antique Japanese Porcelain.”

“I recall him showing me around his home once,” Sarnak said. “He had two desks there, one at which he worked in the
morning on new research, and a second one which was devoted to polishing and preparing for publication papers, and I
think this was used in the afternoons. After making a breakthrough and completing a draft of a new paper, he would put it in
a drawer in the second desk for a period of a year or so to let it mature, before returning to it and presenting it to the
mathematical community. Given his striking publication record, it is clear that this technique was very effective.”

Shimura is survived by his wife, Chikako, his daughter, Tomoko, and his son, Haru. Memorial donations may be made to
the Department of Mathematics (https://www.math.princeton.edu/) at Princeton.

View or share comments on a blog (https://blogs.princeton.edu/memorial/2019/05/goro-shimura/) intended to honor

Shimura’s life and legacy.

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