He studied mathematics at Osaka University, graduating in 1947 with a Master of Science then traveled to the United States on a U.S. Army Fulbright Scholarship.
Andrew Whitman, SJ, founder of the Clavius Research Group, who maintained a close relationship with his advisor over the years.
During this time he embarked on a major collaborative project with Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi at the University of California, Berkeley, resulting in the classic two-volume work, Foundations of Differential Geometry in 1963.
When the book came out in a new edition in 1979, Nomizu specifically acknowledged help from a student, Marty Magid, who started as a freshman at Brown in his linear algebra class and ended up writing a Ph.D. thesis under his direction in 1978.
Among his nearly one hundred papers and articles and seven books, he had twenty-three co-authors from Belgium, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Yugoslavia and the U.S.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1994, a large group of students, co-authors and colleagues gathered for a six-day celebration co-sponsored by the Catholic Universities of Brussels and Leuven, leading to a Festschrift in his honor containing 62 papers with authors from 18 countries.