Pioneers of Science

PIONEER: JAPAN

pioneers of science

Japan

Of the great scientists and inventors to have emerged during the past 100 years, International Innovation draws attention to a few of the most prolific

Hideki Yukawa Koichi Tanaka

(23 JANUARY 1907 – 8 SEPTEMBER 1981), was a Japanese theoretical (3 AUGUST, 1959 – PRESENT) is a Japanese engineer who shared the physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002

By the age of 28, Yukawa had published his theory of mesons, which Tanaka completed a degree in electrical engineering at Tohoku University explained the interaction between protons and neutrons, and quickly before broadening his horizons to medical equipment and X-ray devices became a leading light on research into elementary particles. Five years thanks to his mentor Professor Saburo Adachi. “This struck a chord later, in 1940, he became a professor at Kyoto University, and in the same with me, rekindling the possibility that I might yet satisfy my desire to year, he won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy. help suffering people, albeit indirectly,” he notes. Tanaka faced many hurdles throughout his career, but he eventually was responsible for Yukawa eventually moved to the US in 1949 to become a professor at developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological Columbia University and it was during this time that he received the macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich, and Nobel Prize in Physics, after the discovery by Cecil Frank Powell, Giuseppe awarded the joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry over 20 years after he began Occhialini and César Lattes of Yukawa’s predicted pion in 1947. Yukawa his professional career. also worked on the theory of K-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus. Most of the work performed by a development engineer results in failure. However, the occasional visit of success Those who explore an unknown world are travellers without provides just the excitement an engineer needs to face a map; the map is the result of exploration. The position of work the following day. their destination is not known to them, and the direct path that leads to it is not yet made. Yukihiro Matsumoto

(14 APRIL 1965 – PRESENT) is a Japanese computer scientist and Kenichi Fukui software programmer

(4 OCTOBER 1918 – 9 JANUARY 1998), won the Nobel Prize Matsumoto (‘Matz’) was chief designer of the open source and in Chemistry for his research on the role of frontier orbitals in simple-to-understand Ruby programming language and its reference chemical reactions implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI). Matz has always been keen to share his enjoyment of programming with the world and often Specifically, Fukui was co-recipient with Ronald Hoffman, for their makes his products freely available. Since 2011, he has been Chief independent investigations that showed how molecules share loosely Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San bonded electrons that occupy the highest and lowest unoccupied Francisco, USA. He is a fellow of Rakuten Institute of Technology in Japan, molecular orbital (HOMO, LUMO). and he was recently appointed as Technical Advisor for VASILY, Inc.

Chemistry itself knows altogether too well that – given the Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one real fear that the scarcity of global resources and energy way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from might threaten the unity of mankind – chemistry is in a Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby position to make a contribution towards securing a true users free (sic). I want to give them the freedom to choose. peace on Earth.