The Kakutani Theorems

[Garbarsardar]

Shizuo Kakutani died recently. If you have never heard of him, here are two reference points. The movie and book A Beautiful Mind was about the mathematician John Nash, who won the Nobel prize in economics. Nash’s most famous concept, the Nash Equilibrium, is based on the Kakutani Fixed Point Theorem. The most infl uential book reviewer at The New York Times is Michiko Kakutani; she is Shizuo Kakutani’s daughter.

Anywho, Kakutani was a Japanese mathematician. At the start of World War II, he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. With the outbreak of war he was given the option of staying at the Institute or returning to Japan. He chose to return because he was concerned about his mother.

So he was put on a Swedish ship which sailed across the Atlantic, down around the Cape, and up to Madagascar, or thereabouts, where he and other Japanese were traded for Americans aboard a ship from Japan. The trip across the Atlantic was long and hard. There was the constant fear of being torpedoed by the Germans. What, you may wonder, did Kakutani do. He proved theorems. Every day, he sat on deck and worked on his mathematics. Every night, he took his latest theorem, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Each one contained the instruction that if found it should be sent to the Institute in Princeton. To this day, not a single letter has been received.

lol

So what do you think about the lost theorems?

[Gaius Baltar]

Shizuo Kakutani died recently. If you have never heard of him, here are two reference points. The movie and book A Beautiful Mind was about the mathematician John Nash, who won the Nobel prize in economics. Nash’s most famous concept, the Nash Equilibrium, is based on the Kakutani Fixed Point Theorem. The most infl uential book reviewer at The New York Times is Michiko Kakutani; she is Shizuo Kakutani’s daughter.

Anywho, Kakutani was a Japanese mathematician. At the start of World War II, he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. With the outbreak of war he was given the option of staying at the Institute or returning to Japan. He chose to return because he was concerned about his mother.

So he was put on a Swedish ship which sailed across the Atlantic, down around the Cape, and up to Madagascar, or thereabouts, where he and other Japanese were traded for Americans aboard a ship from Japan. The trip across the Atlantic was long and hard. There was the constant fear of being torpedoed by the Germans. What, you may wonder, did Kakutani do. He proved theorems. Every day, he sat on deck and worked on his mathematics. Every night, he took his latest theorem, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Each one contained the instruction that if found it should be sent to the Institute in Princeton. To this day, not a single letter has been received.

lol

So what do you think about the lost theorems?

Given that there is no physical evidence for there existance, it would seem that there is no real reason for the arguement. Also, I think it unlikely that the Captain of the ship would allow him, in wartime, to drop these little notes overboard as they would pose a "security risk" for the ship. Moreover, given the almost certain shortage of paper on the ship, such a valuable resource would not have been wasted so friviously.

I will stand corrected if one of these mythological theorems appear.

And you say he died recently? You mean 2004... :hmmm: