Yozo Matsushima - Professorship

Professorship

Matsushima became a full professor at Nagoya University in 1953. Chevalley visited Matsushima in Nagoya in 1953 and invited him to spend the following year in France. He went to France in 1954 and returned to Nagoya in December 1955. He also spent time at the University of Strasbourg. He presented some of his results to Ehresmann's seminar in Strasbourg, extending Cartan's classification of complex irreducible Lie algebras to the case of real Lie algebras.

In spring 1960, Matsushima became a professor of Osaka University as successor to the chair of Shoda. His research took a somewhat different direction and he wrote a series of papers on cohomology of locally symmetric spaces, collaborating with Murakami. He went to the Institute for Advanced Study in September 1962 and returned to Osaka after one year. He jointly began to organize the United States-Japan Seminar in Differential Geometry, which was held in Kyoto in June 1965. After this, he went to France and spent the academic year 1965-66 as visiting professor at the University of Grenoble. He accepted a chair at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana in September 1966. He continued to collaborate with Murakami. He introduced Matsushima's formula for the Betti numbers of quotients of symmetric spaces. In 1967, he became an editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry and remained on the editorial board for the rest of his life. After 14 years at Notre Dame, he returned to Japan in 1980. A conference was organized in his honor in May 1980 before he left Notre Dame.