, is a Japanese engineer and neuroscientist born in 1936 in

Tokyo Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...

, Japan.

Overviews

He majored in Mathematical Engineering in 1958 from the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

then graduated in 1963 from the Graduate School of the

. His

Master of Engineering A Master of Engineering (abbreviated MEng, ME, M.E. or M.Eng.) is a Professional degree, professional master's degree in the field of engineering. International variations Australia In Australia, the Master of Engineering degree is a research ...

in 1960 was entitled ''Topological and Information-Theoretical Foundation of Diakoptics and Codiakoptics''. His

Doctor of Engineering The Doctor of Engineering (DEng or EngD) or Doctor of Engineering Sciences is a research doctorate in engineering and applied science. An EngD is a terminal degree similar to a PhD in engineering but applicable more in industry rather than in ac ...

in 1963 was entitled ''Diakoptics of Information Spaces''. Shun'ichi Amari received several awards and is a visiting professor of various universities. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and is best known for developing

Information Geometry Information geometry is an interdisciplinary field that applies the techniques of differential geometry to study probability theory and statistics. It studies statistical manifolds, which are Riemannian manifolds whose points correspond to proba ...

. He also independently invented the

Hopfield network A Hopfield network (or associative memory) is a form of recurrent neural network, or a spin glass system, that can serve as a content-addressable memory. The Hopfield network, named for John Hopfield, consists of a single layer of neurons, where ...

in 1972, a form of self-organized

recurrent neural network Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a class of artificial neural networks designed for processing sequential data, such as text, speech, and time series, where the order of elements is important. Unlike feedforward neural networks, which proces ...

. He is currently holding a position of the

RIKEN is a national scientific research institute in Japan. Founded in 1917, it now has about 3,000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan, including the main site at Wakō, Saitama, Wakō, Saitama Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Riken is a ...

lab and is vice-president of Brain Science Institute, director of Brain Style Information Systems Group and team leader of Mathematical Neuroscience Laboratory. He was a winner of the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1997)

Key works

* A Geometrical Theory of Information (in Japanese), Kyoritsu, 1968 * Information Theory (in Japanese), Daiamondo-sha, 1971 * Mathematical Theory of Nerve Nets (in Japanese), Sangyotosho, 1978 * Methods of Information Geometry, in collaboration with Hiroshi Nagaoka, originally published in Japanese in 1993 and published in English in 2000 with the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

Awards and honors

* Japan Academy Prize (1995) * IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1997) * C&C Prize (2003) *

Person of Cultural Merit is an official Japanese recognition and honour which is awarded annually to select people who have made outstanding cultural contributions. This distinction is intended to play a role as a part of a system of support measures for the promotion of ...

(2012) *

Order of Culture The is a Japanese Order (decoration), order, established on February 11, 1937. The order has one class only, and may be awarded to men and women for contributions to Japanese Art, Japan's art, Japanese Literature, literature, science, technolog ...

(2019) *

Kyoto Prize The is Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences. It is given not only to those that are top representatives of their own respective fields, but to "those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, ...

(2025)Kyoto Prize 2025
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References

External links

at Riken lab
Information Geometry and Its Applications
presented durin
ETVC´08 - Paris
in November 2008
Unconventional Computation 2010 (UC10)
at Toky, invited speaker
ResearchMap profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Amari, Shunichi Japanese computer scientists Japanese neuroscientists Academic staff of the University of Tokyo University of Tokyo alumni Academics from Tokyo Living people 1936 births Riken personnel Persons of Cultural Merit Recipients of the Order of Culture Scientists from Tokyo