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Heisuke Hironaka is a Japanese mathematician. He entered Kyoto University in 1949. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kyoto University, he received his Ph.D. in 1960 from Harvard while under the direction of Oscar Zariski. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970.
He is celebrated for proving in 1964 that singularities of algebraic varieties admit resolutions in characteristic zero. This means that any algebraic variety can be replaced by a similar variety which has no singularities. He also introduced Hironaka's example showing that a deformation of Kähler manifolds need not be Kähler.
Hironaka was for many years a Professor of mathematics at Harvard University but currently lives in Japan. He held teaching positions at Brandeis University, Columbia University and Kyoto University. He was a president of Yamaguchi University. He has been active in raising funds for causes such as mathematical education.
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