Rate My Professor Shin-ichi Ohta

Shin-ichi Ohta is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Osaka University. He received a Master of Science degree in 2001 and a Doctor of Science degree in 2003 from Tohoku University. From 2003 to 2009 he served as Assistant Professor and from 2009 to 2017 as Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Kyoto University. Since April 2017 he has held his current position at Osaka University. He has also been affiliated with the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, serving as part-time Team Leader of the Mathematical Analysis Team from 2017 to 2022 and as Visiting Researcher in the Mathematical Science Team since 2022.

Ohta’s research centers on differential geometry and geometric analysis, with emphasis on curvature in Riemannian manifolds, Finsler manifolds, metric measure spaces, and related structures, as well as connections to optimal transport theory, gradient flows, and probability theory. He is the author of the book Comparison Finsler Geometry, published by Springer in 2021. Among his honors are the Takebe Prize (2005), Geometry Prize (2011), Spring Prize (2012), and JSPS Prize (2014) from the Mathematical Society of Japan, the Young Scientists’ Award from MEXT (2012), the Humboldt Research Award (2025), and the Awards for Science and Technology from MEXT (2026). He has supervised multiple doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, several of whom have received the Takebe Prize.