Gauss prize for Japanese math wizard

Japan’s Kiyoshi Ito shared with fellow mathematical genius Grigory Perelman by winning Gauss prize for mathematics.90-year-old Ito received the inaugural prize worth 10,000 euros (11,500 dollars) in person at the 25th annual International Congress of Mathematicians presided by Spanish King Juan Carlos. Ito had made a major contribution to 20th Century applied mathematics and credited him with laying the foundations of the theory of stochastic differential equations and stochastic analysis.Stochastics involves creating models of study around random events which can happen at any time. Their practical application is highly diverse, ranging from population dynamics to engineering filtering and, of particular interest to financial analysts, probabilities of financial risk.The idea underpins market instruments such as options and futures, whereby prices are calculated according to stochastic analysis. In biology, the theory allows biologists to assess the probability of a gene dominating a species.Ito, born on September 7, 1915 in Hokusei-cho, Mie prefecture, central southern Japan, was professor at the University of Kyoto until his retirement in 1979.He also held a string of lectureships at institutions as august as Cornell and Princeton, where he began his US career in 1954.After graduating from the Imperial University, Tokyo, Ito went on to work for the national statistical office, publishing seminal works on theories of probability and stochastics. He was awarded a PhD in 1945.The Gauss prize, awarded by the International Mathematical Union and the German Mathematical Union, is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who was known as the “prince of mathematicians” owing to contributions across a wide range of fields from number theory and differential geometry to astronomy