Goro Nishida

Goro Nishida (18 September 1943 in Osaka – 2 June 2014) was a Japanese mathematician. He was a leading member of the Japanese school of Homotopy theory (following in the tradition of Hiroshi Toda). He received his PhD from Kyoto University in 1973, after spending the 1971-72 academic year at Manchester University in England. His proof in 1973 of Michael Barratt's conjecture (that positive-degree elements in the stable homotopy ring of spheres are nilpotent) was a major breakthrough: following Frank Adams' solution of the Hopf invariant one problem, it marked the beginning of a new global understanding of algebraic topology.

His contributions to the field were celebrated in 2003 at the NishidaFest in Kinosaki,followed by a satellite conference at the Nagoya Institute of Technology; the proceedings were published in Geometry and Topology's monograph series. In 2000 he was the leading organizer for a concentration year at the Japan-US Mathematics Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

His earliest work grew out of the study of infinite loopspaces; his first paper (in 1968, on what came eventually to be known as the Nishida relations) accounts for interactions between Steenrod and Kudo-Araki (Dyer–Lashof) operations. Some of his later work concerns a circle of ideas surrounding the Segal conjecture, transfer homomorphisms, and stable splittings of classifying spaces of groups. The ideas in this series of papers have by now grown into a rich subfield of homotopy theory; it continues today in (for example) the theory of P-compact groups.