The Inamori Foundation announced the 2025 fellows for the Inamori Research Institute for Science (InaRIS) Fellowship Program on March 14, 2025. This year, we are pleased to welcome Toda, Yukinobu (Professor, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, The University of Tokyo) and Hiraoka, Yasuaki (Professor, Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University), who were selected from 29 applicants through an open call under the theme of “Deepening and Expanding Mathematics.”
2025 InaRIS Fellow
Toda, Yukinobu
Professor, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, The University of Tokyo
| Research Topics | Developing new research areas through categorical Donaldson-Thomas theory |
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| Summary | The Donaldson-Thomas invariant is a virtual count of geometric objects, such as spheres or donut-type surfaces, in a complex Calabi-Yau 3-fold, and is an important research subject both in mathematics and theoretical physics. On the other hand, a ‘category’ is an abstract mathematical notion, which is regarded as a kind of community of mathematical objects. So far I used categories to elucidate several properties of the invariants and proved some conjectures. In this research, I will construct categories which recover the invariants, regard them as non-commutative spaces, and explore a new research area which connects several mathematical fields through them. |
2025 InaRIS Fellow
Hiraoka, Yasuaki
Professor, Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University
| Research Topics | Challenge to human biology from mathematics |
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| Summary | In recent biology, comprehensive experiments are generating vast amounts of data, but there is a critical shortage of data analysis methods that enable us to discover biological principles from those data. While we deepen biological understandings by revealing the intrinsic data structures within species and the relative relationships between species, this mathematically corresponds to extracting invariants of spaces and mappings defined by the data, respectively. In this research, we address the biological question “What makes us human?” by developing mathematical data analysis methods to elucidate the principles of species differences. |