[3] His disciples include Masaki Kashiwara, Takahiro Kawai, Tetsuji Miwa, as well as Michio Jimbo, who have been called the "Sato School".
[6][1] Sato was known for his innovative work in a number of fields, such as prehomogeneous vector spaces and Bernstein–Sato polynomials; and particularly for his hyperfunction theory.
[3] In theoretical physics, Sato wrote a series of papers in the 1970s with Michio Jimbo and Tetsuji Miwa that developed the theory of holonomic quantum fields.
"[2][3] Sato also contributed basic work to non-linear soliton theory, with the use of Grassmannians of infinite dimension.
[8] Pierre Schapira remarked, "Looking back, 40 years later, we realize that Sato's approach to mathematics is not so different from that of Grothendieck, that Sato did have the incredible temerity to treat analysis as algebraic geometry and was also able to build the algebraic and geometric tools adapted to his problems.