Early Life
Matsushima was born on February 11, 1921 in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. He studied at Osaka Imperial University (later named Osaka University) and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in September 1942. At Osaka, he was taught by mathematicians Kenjiro Shoda. After completing his degree, he was appointed as an assistant in the Mathematical Institute of Nagoya Imperial University (later named Nagoya University). These were difficult years for Japanese students and researchers because of World War II.
The first paper published by Matsushima contained a proof that a conjecture of Hans Zassenhaus was false. Zassenhaus had conjectured that every semisimple Lie algebra L over a field of prime characteristic, with = L, is the direct sum of simple ideals. Matsushima constructed a counterexample. He then developed a proof that Cartan subalgebras of a complex Lie algebra are conjugate. However, Japanese researchers were out of touch with the research done in the West, and Matsushima was unaware that French mathematician Claude Chevalley had already published a proof. When he obtained details of another paper of Chevalley through a review in Mathematical Reviews, he was able to construct the proofs for himself.
Matsushima published two papers in the 1947 volume of the Proceedings of the Japan Academy (which did not appear until 1950) and three papers in the first volume of Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan.
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