IHES
Professor Kenji Fukaya, recipient of the 2025 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences
IHES extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Kenji Fukaya, recipient of the 2025 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences, in recognition of his foundational contributions to symplectic geometry. This prestigious distinction honors his pivotal role in the creation of the Fukaya category, as well as his profound and lasting contributions to symplectic topology, gauge theory, and mirror symmetry.
Born in Yokohama in 1959, Kenji Fukaya pursued his academic studies at the University of Tokyo, where he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1986 with a thesis entitled ‘A boundary of the set of Riemannian manifolds with bounded curvatures and diameters.’ After working at the University of Tokyo throughout the 1980s—first as a research assistant and later as an Associate Professor—he became a professor at Kyoto University in 1994. In 2013, he joined the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in the United States as a permanent member. Since 2024, Kenji Fukaya has been a professor at the Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BIMSA) as well as at the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center (YMSC) of Tsinghua University in China.
As Mohammed Abouzaid, Professor of Mathematics at Standford University points out, “it is difficult to overstate the impact of Fukaya’s work across wide parts of symplectic topology and gauge theory. He created a link between a subject where visual thinking had previously been the fundamental source of new insights, to highly structured areas of mathematics where algebraic methods predominate, enabling the emergence of a new style which combines the best of both approaches.”
Denis Auroux, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, comments: “Kenji Fukaya’s extraordinary mathematical vision and ideas (and his generosity in sharing them) have been hugely influential to the development of modern symplectic geometry over the last 30 years, during which Floer homology and Fukaya categories have become ubiquitous. I am pleased to see his life’s work receive the Shaw Prize. Congratulations Kenji!”
Two lectures by Kenji Fukaya are freely available on the IHES YouTube channel:
“Can one use virtual fundamental chain in (topological) quantum field theory ?”
