was a Japanese
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
who studied
group theory
In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups.
The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...
.
Biography
He was a professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Unive ...
from 1953 to his death. He also had visiting positions at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
(1960–61), the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...
(1962–63, 1968–69, spring 1981), the
University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...
(spring 1971), and the
University of Padua
The University of Padua ( it, Università degli Studi di Padova, UNIPD) is an Italian university located in the city of Padua, region of Veneto, northern Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from ...
(1994). Suzuki received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Tokyo, despite having moved to the United States the previous year. He was the first to attack the
Burnside conjecture, that every finite non-abelian simple group has even order.
A notable achievement was his discovery in 1960 of the
Suzuki groups, an infinite family of the only non-abelian simple groups whose order is not divisible by 3. The smallest, of order 29120, was the first simple group of order less than 1 million to be discovered since
Dickson's list of 1900.
He classified several classes of simple groups of small rank, including the
CIT-groups and
C-groups and
CA-group In mathematics, in the realm of group theory, a group is said to be a CA-group or centralizer abelian group if the centralizer of any nonidentity element is an abelian subgroup. Finite CA-groups are of historical importance as an early example o ...
s.
There is also a
sporadic simple group called the
Suzuki group, which he announced in 1968. The
Tits ovoid is also referred to as the Suzuki ovoid.
He wrote several textbooks in
Japanese.
See also
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Baer–Suzuki theorem
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Bender–Suzuki theorem
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Brauer–Suzuki theorem
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Brauer–Suzuki–Wall theorem
Publications
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References
M. Aschbacher, H. Bender, W. Feit, R. Solomon, ''Michio Suzuki (1926–1998)'', Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 46 (1999), no. 5, 543–551.
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External links
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20th-century Japanese mathematicians
20th-century American mathematicians
1926 births
1998 deaths
Group theorists
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty
{{Asia-mathematician-stub