Kato, Todorov to Retire in June 2018
Goro Kato
Goro Kato was born in 1948 in Kariya, Japan, where the founder and first president of Toyota, Mr. Sakichi Toyota, was born and raised. He came to the United States as a graduate student on a Rotary International Foundation Fellowship in June 1972. He earned his doctorate at the University Rochester, in New York with advisor Saul Lubkin who proved Weil’s conjectures (except the Weil-Riemann hypothesis). Kato came to Cal Poly in June 1981 as an assistant professor.
He has given 75 talks, lectures, workshops and seminars at international conferences in Italy, Belgium, the U.K., Romania, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Japan and the U.S., including presentations for the European Science Foundation supported Advanced Lecture Series. He has published forty papers and six books.
Kato has been invited to the Institute for Advanced Study — one of the world’s leading centers for basic research, located in Princeton, New Jersey — seven times. His first invitation was arranged by Professor R. Langlands in 1986, with subsequent invitations arranged by Professor P. Deligne.
His areas of study are p-adic cohomology and its zeta invariants (See The Heart of Cohomology published by Springer, 2006), the theory of D-modules (See Fundamentals of Algebraic Microlocal Analysis, coauthor: Daniele Struppa, published by Chapman & Hall / CRC, 1999), temporal topos in theoretical physics (See Elements of Temporal Topos, published by Abramis Academic, Arima Publishing, 2013), and cohomological algebra. He recently finished the manuscript for his memoir, “Being Here” to be published by Iwanami-Shoten, Tokyo, in 2018 or 2019.
Todor Todorov
Todor D. Todorov earned his doctorate in mathematical (theoretical) physics from the University of Sofia and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1982 under Christo Yankov Christov, a professor of the University of Sofia and Academician of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, a prominent theoretical physicist and one of the founders of mathematical physics in Bulgaria.
Todorov emigrated to the U.S. in 1988 as a political immigrant from then communist Bulgaria and has been a U.S. citizen since 1994.
After earning his doctorate, Todorov held the following permanent and visiting positions: research fellow at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria; visiting research fellow at the International Institute for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy; visiting professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) at Trieste; visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and since 1990, a lecturer and then a professor of mathematics at Cal Poly.
His favorite course to teach was Math 248, Methods of Proof. He was the advisor for two master theses in mathematics and numerous senior projects and produced several joint articles with students.
Todorov published almost forty articles in different mathematical journals. Most of his research, beginning with his dissertation, is on the application of non-standard analysis (modern theory of infinitesimals) to the Colombeau theory of generalized functions and the problem of multiplication of Schwartz distributions. He also has published articles on the compactification of ordered topological spaces, solvability of linear partial differential equations with smooth coefficients, standard and non-standard asymptotic analysis, Laplace transform, and teaching calculus, in particular, how to teach limits using infinitesimals.
After retiring, Todorov plans to work on a research monograph tentatively titled “An Axiomatic Approach to the Colombeau Theory of Generalized Functions” and enjoy life as much as possible in both California and Europe.
