Tadashi Tokieda

Tokieda was born in Tokyo and initially intended to be a painter. He then studied at Lycée Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun Tokieda joined the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as a J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor for the 1997 academic year. He has been involved in the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences since its beginning in 2003. In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he became the Director of Studies in Mathematics and the Stephan and Thomas Körner Fellow. He was the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow in 2013–2014 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In the academic year 2015–2016 he was the Poincaré Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford. Besides his native language Japanese, he is also fluent in French and English. In addition, he knows ancient Greek, Latin, classical Chinese, Finnish, Spanish, and Russian. When asked how many languages he knows, he answered "I don't really know. It's like asking how many friends you have." So far he has lived in eight countries. In March 2020, Tokieda was interviewed on The Joy of X, Steven Strogatz's podcast for Quanta Magazine. ==Selected publications==