Makoto Kobayashi (小林 誠, Kobayashi Makoto, born April 7, 1944, in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one-fourth of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

[5] Many years later, Toshiki Kaifu recalled Kobayashi: "when he was a child, he was a quiet and lovely boy, always reading some difficult books in my room.

Together, with his colleague Toshihide Maskawa, he worked on explaining CP-violation within the Standard Model of particle physics.

Kobayashi and Maskawa's article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction",[7] published in 1973, is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2010.

[1] In recognition of three Nobel laureates' contributions, the bronze statues of Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Leo Esaki, and Makoto Kobayashi was set up in the Central Park of Azuma 2 in Tsukuba City in 2015.