| Tadashi Tokieda | |
| Birth Place: | Tokyo, Japan |
| Fields: | Mathematics |
| Workplaces: | Princeton University Cambridge University Stanford University |
| Education: | Sophia University[1] University of Oxford Princeton University |
| Thesis Title: | Null Sets of Symplectic Capacity |
| Thesis Url: | https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=60734 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | William Browder |
| Awards: | Paul R. Halmos–Lester R. Ford Award (2014)[2] |
Tadashi Tokieda (Japanese: 時枝正; born 1968) is a Japanese mathematician, working in mathematics and physics. He is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University; previously he was a fellow and Director of Studies of Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is also very active in inventing, collecting, and studying toys that uniquely reveal and explore real-world surprises of mathematics and physics. In comparison with most mathematicians, he had an unusual path in life: he started as a painter, and then became a classical philologist, before switching to mathematics. Tokieda is known for his outstanding public lectures where he shows mathematical phenomena and teaches how to use mathematical concepts in a simple, entertaining and beautiful way.
Tokieda was born in Tokyo and initially intended to be a painter.[3] He then studied at Lycée Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun in France as a classical philologist. According to his personal homepage, he taught himself basic mathematics from Russian collections of problems.
He is a 1989 classics graduate from Sophia University in Tokyo and has a 1991 bachelor's degree from Oxford in mathematics (where he studied as a British Council Fellow). He obtained his PhD at Princeton in 1996 under the supervision of William Browder.[4]
Tokieda joined the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as a J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor for the 1997 academic year.[5]
He has been involved in the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences since its beginning in 2003.
In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he became the Director of Studies in Mathematics and the Stephan and Thomas Körner Fellow.[6] [7]
He was the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow in 2013–2014 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.[8]
In the academic year 2015–2016 he was the Poincaré Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford.[9]
Besides his native language Japanese, he is also fluent in French and English. In addition, he knows ancient Greek, Latin, classical Chinese, Finnish, Spanish, and Russian.[10] When asked how many languages he knows, he answered "I don't really know. It's like asking how many friends you have."[11] So far he has lived in eight countries.[12]
In March 2020, Tokieda was interviewed on The Joy of X, Steven Strogatz's podcast for Quanta Magazine.[13]