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- Mathematician
Masayoshi Nagata, 1927
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Masayoshi Nagata (Japanese: 永田 雅宜 Nagata Masayoshi; February 9, 1927 - August 27, 2008) was a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in the field of commutative algebra.
In 1959 he brought forward a counterexample to the general case of Hilbert's fourteenth problem on invariant theory.
One of his students at Kyoto University was Shigefumi Mori.
Nagata's conjecture on curves concerns the minimum degree of a plane curve specified to have given multiplicities at given points; see also Seshadri constant. Nagata's conjecture on automorphisms concerns the existence of wild automorphisms of polynomial algebras in three variables. Recent work has solved this latter problem in the affirmative.
Nagata's compactification theorem shows that varieties can be embedded in complete varieties.