Ito, Kiyoshi

▪ 2009

      Japanese mathematician

born Sept. 7, 1915, Hokusei-cho, Mie prefecture, Japan

died Nov. 10, 2008, Kyoto, Japan

was a major contributor to the theory of probability. Building on the work of Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov, Paul Lévy, and Joseph Leo Doob, Ito was able to apply the techniques of differential and integral calculus to stochastic processes (random phenomena that evolve over time), such as Brownian motion. This work became known as the Ito stochastic calculus. The Ito calculus was applied in a number of fields, including engineering, population genetics, and mathematical finance. Ito graduated (1938) from the Imperial University in Tokyo, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1945. He worked (1939–43) for the Cabinet Statistics Bureau before serving as an assistant professor (1943–52) at Nagoya Imperial University and professor (1952–79) at Kyoto University, where he was director (1976–79) of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Ito also held academic appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.; Stanford University; Århus (Den.) University; Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.; and Gakushuin University, Tokyo. Among the awards bestowed on Ito were the Wolf Foundation Prize (1987), the Kyoto Prize (1998), and the Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize for Applications of Mathematics (2006).

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