Irish Japanese Mathematical Connections: March 2026
In previous blogs here, we have surveyed Irish mathematical connections with France (July 2019), Austria (Jan 2021), Switzerland (Jan 2022), Holland (Jul 2022), Poland (Jan 2023), Norway (Nov 2023), and Sweden (Nov 2025). This month, we turn our attention to Japan.
Our goal is to include those whose mathematical training and/or careers included time in both Ireland and Japan. In addition to Irish and Japanese people, we feature some from elsewhere who, for instance, got education in one country and found employment in the other.
The visible Irish/Japanese mathematical overlap appears to be modest, asymmetric, and dominated by theoretical physics. Everyone discussed below had mathematical training. There are 2 notable cases of Japanese scholars earning PhDs in Dublin in the 1960s. There may be similar stories yet to be uncovered in the context of Belfast.
We recommend the article "Japanese Studies in Ireland" (Louis M Cullen, 2000), for good background.
Traditionally, Japanese degrees were not designated as they are in much of the west, but rather Rigakushi (equivalent to a BSc or MSc) and Rigaku-hakase (DSc or PhD). For simplicity, we ignore this below.
The 1990 ICM was held in Tokyo, and several Irish mathematicians participated in that, as documented at our associated blog from Nov 2018. The 4000 attendees included Tom Laffey, Tony O'Farrell, Francesca O'Rourke, and Sean Tobin.
Among those maths-trained people whose careers had Irisn and Japanese aspects, we briefly mention a few whose mathematical lives were restricted to one of those two countries:
Kanichi Terazawa (寺沢 寛一, Terazawa Kan'ichi, 1882-1969) got his DSc in 1917 under Antrim's Joseph Larmor.
Dmitri Perron from France, who did his PhD at DCU in 2008, worked in industry in Japan before settling in Australia.
Gavin Duffy (educated entirely at UCD) has worked for Goldman-Sachs in Japan since 2006.
Thanks to Asako Akai, Mari Imaeda, Luke Drury, Peter Hogan, David Malone and others for invaluable input.
Please alert us to any omissions or errors.
Last updated 2 Jun 2026.
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01. Engineer and mathematician John Perry (1850-1920) was born 14 Feb in Garvagh, Londonderry. He was educated at Queen's Belfast (BE & gold medal 1870, MA 1882), and his academic career includegggd short stints in Bristol (1871-1874), Glasgow (1874-1875, with William Thomson, aka Kelvin, whom he successfully challenged on the subject of thermal conductivity), and Imperial College (Tokyo, 1875-1878) before setting down at Finsbury Technical College in 1882 and later Imperial College (1896-1913). He authored 5 books on mechanics and applied maths, including one on spinning tops. He received an honorary DSc from RUI in 1886, and an honorary LLD from Glasgow in 1901. His sister Agnes (below) also did maths, and his nieces included pioneering early engineering graduate Alice and mathematics graduate Agnes (Molly). |
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02. Kuninosuke Imaeda (今枝國之助, Kuninosuke Imaeda 1918-2012) was born 5 Jul in Okayama and was educated at Osaka Univ (1941-1943). Following military service he worked at Kawasaki Machine-Manufacturing Factory until 1950. His academic career was spent at Yamanashi Univ in Kofu (1950-1958), DIAS (1958-1981), and finally Okayama Univ (1981-1990). His work included new methods of studying high-energy particle collisions and secondary particle decay, and a quaternion and biquaternion approach to classical electrodynamics. He co-authored the book Black Hole Physics (1981) with his daughter Mari (see below). DIAS / ResearchGate / Books
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03. George Hall (1925-2018) was born 5 May in Belfast, and was educated at QUB (BSc 1946) and Cambridge (PhD 1950). His thesis on "Contributions to the Theory of Chemical Valency", in which he introduced the self-consistent field (SCF) method and what are now known as the Roothaan-Hall equations. was done under John Lennard-Jones. His career was spent at Cambridge (1950-1955), Imperial College (1955-1962), Uppsala (1958-1959), and Nottingham (1962-1982). He then worked at Kyoto Univ (1983-1988), as the first foreign professor at a national university in the postwar era, before returning to Nottingham. Of his 13 PhD students, 2 were supervised in Japan. Much of his research was in quantum chemistry, and he authored the books Matrices and Tensors (1963), Applied Group Theory (1965), and Molecular Solid State Physics (1991). He was awarded honorary degrees by Kyoto (1989), Maynooth (2004) and Cambridge. Wikipedia / Bio / Quantum Chem / Obit |
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04. Theoretical physicist Yasushi Takahashi (高橋 康, Takahashi Yasushi, 1924-2013) was born 12 Dec in Osaka, and grew up there and in Taiwan. He was educated at Nagoya Univ (BS 1951, PhD 1954). His thesis on "" was done under Shoichi Sakata. His career started at Rochester and at Iowa State Univ, and at DIAS (1957-1968), culminating in the book An Introduction to Field Quantization (1969). He then moved to the Univ of Alberta in Edmonton (1968-1992), but continued to visit DIAS. He worked in quantum electrodynamics and is remembered for the Ward-Takahashi identity (1957) in quantum field theory. Wikipedia / Japanese Wikipedia / Obit / Award |
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05. Mitsuko Kazuno (数野 美つ子, Kazuno Mitsuko, 1928-2013) was born in Kofu (Yamanashi) and was educated at first at the Imperial Women's College of Science in Toho (Tokyo, 1948). After some school teaching back in Kofu, she was hired to work on calculations for the Cosmic Ray Lab at Yamanashi Univ. This sparked her interest in the physics itself, and after taking more courses at Toho Univ, in 1960 she moved to Ireland to study at DIAS. Her subsequent research resulted in a TCD PhD in 1967, for a thesis on "Multiple Particle Production in Ultra High Energy Nuclear Interactions" done with Ernest Walton. She was at DIAS (1968-1971), then briefly in the USA, at Kofuchu, Toho Univ (Tokyo), and from 1982 on back at Yamanashi Univ. Her research was in high-energy particle physics, especially cosmic rays. |
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06. Theoretical physicist Takaaki Yukawa (今枝真理, Yukawa Takaaki, 1934-1971) was born 29 Sep in Nishinomiya (halfway between Kobe and Osaka), and grew up there and in the USA. He was educated at Columbia (BSc 1957) and Kyoto Universities and at DIAS, obtaining his 1965 PhD from TCD on "Spherically Symmetric Motion of Energy in General Relativity" with John Synge. His short career included time at Univ Manchester and Kent (1966-1970), followed by a brief spell in publishing in Japan. |
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07. Relativist Peter Hogan was born 21 Apr in Dublin and was educated entirely at UCD (BSc 1969, MSc 1970, PhD 1972). His thesis on "The Relativistic Motion of Macroscopic Bodies" was done under Dermott McCrae. His career started at DIAS (1971-1973, Univ of Texas at Austin (1973-1975), TCD 1975-1977, and Maynooth (1977-1978), before settling at UCD (1978-2013). He supervised 5 PhDs and wrote 5 books. He visited Tohuko University (Sendai) numerous times (1991-2011) to collaborate |
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08. Mari Imaeda (今枝真理, Imaeda Mari) was born 1 Oct in Kofu, and grew up there and in Dublin. She was educated at TCD (BA 1975), Univ of Cincinnati (MSc 1977) and UCD (PhD 1980). Her thesis on "The Motion of Sources of Robinson-Trautman Solutions of the General Relativistic Field Equations" was done under Peter Hogan. Her career started at Athlone (1981-1983) and Cleveland State (1987-1993). She co-authored the book Black Hole Physics (1981) with her father Kuni (see above). |
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09. Pat Crehan was born in Offaly and was educated at UCD (BSc 1984, PhD 1989). His thesis on "A Theory of the Deformation of Algebraic Structures Applied to the Ordering Problem, and to the Development of a Perturbation Theory for the Investigation of Quantum Chaos in the Mixed Regime" was done under John Kennedy. He had spells at Tokyo Inst Tech and Kyoto Univ before moving to finance (Belgium). Revolve / ResearchGate / LinkedIn / Link |
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10. Michael Vynnycky was born 13 Mar in London, and was educated at Oxford (BA 1986, DPhil 1991), his thesis on "Mathematical Modelling of the Heat and Mass Transfer in Welding Processes" being done with Andrew Fowler. After a stint at Tohoku Nat Industrial Research Inst in Sendai, Japan (1992-1996), his time has been split between KTH Stockholm (1997-2007, 2014-2018) and Limerick (2008-2014, 2019- ). He has supervised numerous PhD students, 9 of them at Limerick, and co-authored the book Introduction to Perturbation Methods (2022). |
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11. Vivien de Beaucé was born in ?? and was educated at TCD (BSc 1998, MSc in CS 1999, PhD 2004). His thesis on "Discrete Exterior Calculus with Applications to Flows and Spinors" was done under Jim Sexton. After a postdoc in Hokkaido Univ (2004-2006), he has been working as a quant in Switzerland. |
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12. Arnaud Mortier was born in France and was educated at Strasbourg (2006, 2009) and Toulouse (PhD 2013). His thesis on "New Combinatorial Features of Knots and Virtual Knots" was done under Thomas Fiedler. His career started at Osaka () and DCU (2016-). He is now at Caen, where he works both in low-dimensional topology and statistcal analysis for psychology. aaa / ResearchGate /cccc |
