The Story of Masatoshi Gündüz İkeda

J. J. O'Connor & E. F. Robertson
The MacTutor History of Mathematics

Gündüz Ikeda's mother was a school teacher and his father was a statistician. Known as Masatoshi Ikeda for the first part of his life spent in Japan, he was the youngest of his parents four children, having two elder sisters and one elder brother. He entered Osaka University to study mathematics, obtaining his Rigaku-Shi degree (equivalent to a B.Sc.) in 1948. Of course his education had taken place through the years of World War II and the extremely hard years immediately following the war. <..> Ikeda was awarded a Yukawa Scholarship to conduct research on cohomology theory of associative algebras at Nagoya University for session 1953-54. He returned to Osaka University as a Lecturer in Mathematics in 1954 where he continued working on algebras, and published three further papers on the cohomology of algebras. In 1955 he attended the Algebraic Number Theory Symposium in Tokyo and it changed the direction of his research. He decided as a result of that meeting to move towards algebraic number theory and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship allowed him to spend the years from 1957 to 1959 as a research fellow at the Mathematisches Seminar of Hamburg University, working with Hasse's research group. His main research during this period was on the embedding problem of Galois theory.

Another important event happened during these years for he met the Turkish research fellow Emel Ardor, also in Hamburg on an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. She has written:

Dr Ikeda began to show me his interests. He asked me several questions about Turkey, Turkish, and life and customs in Turkey. I soon found out the reason for this curiosity. His teacher Professor Hasse had visited Turkey a couple of times, he loved Turkey, he had friends and students in Turkey, and he was keen on learning Turkish. Further, he met Prof Orhan Içen in Hamburg, and he knew Cahit Arf by name. [Ikeda] was keen on learning new things; [and] he, too, developed a passion for Turkey and Turkish.

Ikeda remained as a Lecturer of Mathematics at Osaka University until 1960 when he first visited Izmir, Turkey, then visited Cahit Arf at Istanbul University. Arf had studied in Göttingen under Hasse, so the two had many common interests. Ikeda was appointed as Foreign Specialist in Mathematics and Statistics at the Medical School of Ege University in Izmir in 1960. After a while, however, he was appointed Associate Professor of Mathematics in the newly established Mathematics Department of Ege University. <..> Ikeda married Emel Ardor, the Turkish research assistant he had met in Hamburg, in 1964. He also became a Turkish citizen in that year and took a more Turkish sounding name, calling himself Gündüz Ikeda. He spent time at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, was a Visiting Professor at Hamburg during the Spring Semester of 1966, and then in the following year he was promoted to full Professor at Ege University. In May 1968 Arf and Langlands visited Ege University to deliver talks on The Cartan-Dieudonné Theorem and Automorphic Forms. At a dinner following the talks, Arf offered Ikeda a position at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara where he was now working. Ikeda accepted and took up the position of Professor there in August of 1968 and, together with Arf, worked to build up both the undergraduate and postgraduate sides of the Mathematics Department.

Although Ikeda remained in his post at the Middle East Technical University until 1976, he spent 1970-71 as Visiting Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, California, USA. He left the Middle East Technical University in 1976, spent the autumn term of 1976 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, then during the years 1976-78 he was Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Hacettepe University. In 1978 he returned to the Middle East Technical University where he remained until he retired in 1991.

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