Kyoto University

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga or Shin'ichirō Tomonaga was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which... he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger. Tomonaga was born in Tokyo in 1906. He was the second child and eldest son of a Japanese philosopher, Sanjūrō Tomonaga. He entered the Kyoto Imperial University in 1926. Hideki Yukawa, also a Nobel Prize winner, was one of his classmates during undergraduate school. During graduate school at the same university, he worked as an assistant in the university for three years. After graduate school, he joined Nishina's group in Riken. In 1937, while working in Leipzig, he collaborated with the research group of Werner Heisenberg. Two years later, he returned to Japan due to the outbreak of the Second World War, but finished his doctoral degree on the study of nuclear materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig. In Japan, he was appointed to a professorship in the Tokyo University of Education .
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Susumu Tonegawa is a Japanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of the genetic mechanism that... produces antibody diversity. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training. In his later years, he has turned his attention to the molecular and cellular basis of memory formation. Tonegawa is best known for elucidating the genetic mechanism in the adaptive immune system. To achieve the diversity of antibodies needed to protect against any type of antigen, the immune system would require millions of genes coding for different antibodies, if each antibody was encoded by one gene. Instead, as Tonegawa showed in a landmark series of experiments beginning in 1976, genetic material can rearrange itself to form the vast array of available antibodies. Comparing the DNA of B cells in embryonic and adult mice, he observed that genes in the mature B cells of the adult mice are moved around, recombined, and deleted to form the diversity of the variable region of antibodies.
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Kenichi Fukui was a Japanese chemist. Kenichi Fukui was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981 with Roald Hoffmann, for their... independent investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions. His prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions: specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital . Fukui was the eldest of three sons of Ryokichi Fukui, a foreign trade merchant, and Chie Fukui. He was born in Nara, Japan. In his student days between 1938 and 1941, Fukui's interest was stimulated by quantum mechanics and Erwin Schrödinger's famous equation. He also had developed the belief that a breakthrough in science occurs through the unexpected fusion of remotely related fields.
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Ryōji Noyori is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Noyori shared half of the prize with William S. Knowles for... the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the Prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions . Ryōji Noyori was born in Kobe, Japan. He became fascinated with chemistry at age twelve, after hearing a presentation on nylon. He saw the power of chemistry as being the ability to "produce high value from almost nothing". He was a student at Kyoto University, an instructor in the research group of Hitoshi Nozaki, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. After postdoctoral work with Elias J. Corey at Harvard he returned to Nagoya, becoming a full professor in 1972. He is still based at Nagoya, though he is also now president of RIKEN, a multi-site national research initiative with an annual budget of $800 million.
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Hideki Yukawa FRSE né Ogawa , was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate. Yukawa was born in Tokyo and grew up... in Kyoto. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University, he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1932, he married Sumi ; they had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. In 1933 he became an assistant professor at Osaka University, at age 26. In 1935 he published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles. In 1940 he became a professor in Kyoto University. In 1940 he won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy, in 1943 the Decoration of Cultural Merit from the Japanese government. In 1949 he became a professor at Columbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, after the discovery by Cecil Frank Powell, Giuseppe Occhialini and César Lattes of Yukawa's predicted pion in 1947.
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Ryōji Noyori is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Noyori shared half of the prize with William S. Knowles for... the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the Prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions . Ryōji Noyori was born in Kobe, Japan. He became fascinated with chemistry at age twelve, after hearing a presentation on nylon. He saw the power of chemistry as being the ability to "produce high value from almost nothing". He was a student at Kyoto University, an instructor in the research group of Hitoshi Nozaki, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. After postdoctoral work with Elias J. Corey at Harvard he returned to Nagoya, becoming a full professor in 1972. He is still based at Nagoya, though he is also now president of RIKEN, a multi-site national research initiative with an annual budget of $800 million.
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Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user... interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid 2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Alan Kay showed remarkable ability at an early age, learning to read fluently at three years old. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd. Alan Kay said, "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me." Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology.
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Ryōji Noyori is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Noyori shared half of the prize with William S. Knowles for... the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the Prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions . Ryōji Noyori was born in Kobe, Japan. He became fascinated with chemistry at age twelve, after hearing a presentation on nylon. He saw the power of chemistry as being the ability to "produce high value from almost nothing". He was a student at Kyoto University, an instructor in the research group of Hitoshi Nozaki, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. After postdoctoral work with Elias J. Corey at Harvard he returned to Nagoya, becoming a full professor in 1972. He is still based at Nagoya, though he is also now president of RIKEN, a multi-site national research initiative with an annual budget of $800 million.
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