He is also very active in inventing, collecting, and studying toys that uniquely reveal and explore real-world surprises of mathematics and physics.

In comparison with most mathematicians, he had an unusual path in life: he started as a painter, and then became a classical philologist, before switching to mathematics.

He is a 1989 classics graduate from Sophia University[2] in Tokyo and has a 1991 bachelor's degree from Oxford in mathematics (where he studied as a British Council Fellow).

[4] Tokieda joined the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as a J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor for the 1997 academic year.

[6][7] He was the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow in 2013–2014 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.