Masayoshi Nagata

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Masayoshi Nagata (Japanese: 永田 雅宜 Nagata Masayoshi; February 9, 1927 – August 27, 2008) was a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in the field of commutative algebra.

In 1959 he brought forward a counterexample to the general case of Hilbert's fourteenth problem on invariant theory.

One of his students at Kyoto University was Shigefumi Mori.

Nagata's conjecture on curves concerns the minimum degree of a plane curve specified to have given multiplicities at given points; see also Seshadri constant. Nagata's conjecture on automorphisms concerns the existence of wild automorphisms of polynomial algebras in three variables. Recent work has solved this latter problem in the affirmative. (I. P. Shestakov, & U. U. Umirbaev (2004) J. Am. Math. Soc. 17, 197–227).

[edit] Publications

• Nagata, Masayoshi Local rings. Interscience Tracts in Pure and Applied Mathematics, No. 13 Interscience Publishers a division of John Wiley & Sons,New York-London 1962, reprinted by R. E. Krieger Pub. Co (1975) ISBN 0882752286

[edit] Further reading

• Maruyama, Masaki; Masayoshi Miyanishi, Shigefumi Mori, Tadao Oda (January 2009). "Masayoshi Nagata (1927–2008)" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society 56 (1): 58. http://www.ams.org/notices/200901/tx090100056p.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-12-30.