Hiroshi Umemura was a Japanese mathematician and professor at Nagoya University in the field of algebraic geometry and differential equations.
At the beginning of his career, Umemura studied the subgroups of the Cremona group.
In the 1980s, while visiting the University of Strasbourg, he began studying Painlevé equations, particularly Galois theory.
In 1996, Umemura wrote his first of multiple papers on Galois theory, which was influential in the community surrounding Painlevé equations in Japan.
At the time, he had been working on an article titled Toward Quantization of Galois Theory with fellow mathematicians Akira Masuoka and Katsunori Saito.