Masao Haji belongs to the mathematical record as a figure whose results outlasted the problems that prompted them.
The record lists Masao Haji as Japanese political activist, mathematics lecturer and critic.
Masao Haji was born in 1925. His recorded nationality is Japan. He studied at University of Tokyo.
Twentieth-century mathematics became abstract and highly specialised, and its methods reached into physics, economics and computing.
Mathematics is the one discipline whose results, once proved, are never overturned.
That the work was done from Japan matters: mathematical training, institutions and the language of publication have never been evenly distributed.
Masao Haji died in 1998, aged 73. The proofs remain, and a proof does not decay - which is the particular permanence mathematics offers.
