Masamichi Takesaki (竹崎 正道; born July 18, 1933, in Sendai[1]) is a Japanese mathematician working in the theory of operator algebras.
Beginning in 1958 he was a research assistant at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and from 1965 to 1968 he was an associate professor at Tohoku University.
He is known for the Tomita–Takesaki theory, which is about modular automorphisms of von Neumann algebras.
This theory was initially developed by Minoru Tomita until 1967, but his work was published only partially (in Japanese) and was quite difficult to understand, drawing little notice, before being presented by Takesaki in 1970 in a book.
[2][3] In 1970, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice; his talk was about one parameter automorphism groups and states of operator algebras.