Kiiti Morita

Kiiti Morita (森田 紀一, Morita Kiichi, February 11, 1915 – August 4, 1995) was a Japanese mathematician working in algebra and topology.

Kiiti Morita
Born	August 11, 1915 Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan
Died	August 4, 1995 (aged 79) Fuchū, Tokyo, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Alma mater	Tokyo Higher Normal School Osaka University
Known for	Morita equivalence Morita conjectures
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Tsukuba Sophia University
Notable students	Jun-iti Nagata

Morita was born in 1915 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture and graduated from the Tokyo Higher Normal School in 1936. Three years later he was appointed assistant at the Tokyo University of Science.[1] He received his Ph.D. from Osaka University in 1950, with a thesis in topology.[1][2] After teaching at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, he became professor at the University of Tsukuba in 1951. He held this position until 1978, after which he taught at Sophia University.[1][3] Morita died of heart failure in 1995 at the Sakakibara Heart Institute in Tokyo;[3] he was survived by his wife, Tomiko, his son, Yasuhiro, and a grandson.[3][4]

He introduced the concepts now known as Morita equivalence and Morita duality which were given wide circulation in the 1960s by Hyman Bass in a series of lectures. The Morita conjectures on normal topological spaces are also named after him.

Publications

• Morita, Kiiti (1958). "Duality for modules and its applications to the theory of rings with minimum condition". Science Reports of the Tokyo Kyoiku Daigaku. Section A. 6 (150): 83–142. MR 0096700. Zbl 0080.25702.
• Morita, Kiiti (1962). "Paracompactness and product spaces". Fundamenta Mathematicae. 50 (3): 223–236. doi:10.4064/fm-50-3-223-236. MR 0132525.
• Morita, Kiiti (1964). "Products of normal spaces with metric spaces". Mathematische Annalen. 154 (4): 365–382. doi:10.1007/BF01362570. MR 0165491.
• Morita, Kiiti (1977). "Some problems on normality of products of spaces". In Novák, Josef (ed.). General topology and its relations to modern analysis and algebra, IV (Proc. Fourth Prague Topological Sympos., Prague, 1976), Part B. Prague: Soc. Czechoslovak Mathematicians and Physicists. pp. 296–297. MR 0482657.

References

1. Arhangelskii, A.V.; Goodearl, K.R.; Huisgen-Zimmermann, B. (June–July 1997). "Kiiti Morita 1915-1995" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. 44 (6): 680–684.
2. Kiiti Morita at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
3. "Obituary: Kiiti Morita, Mathematician, 80". The New York Times. October 5, 1995. Retrieved July 23, 2020.
4. "Memorial address by John Ewing". American Mathematical Society. August 4, 1998. Retrieved July 23, 2020.