[4] He left a note explaining how far he had progressed with his teaching duties, and apologizing to his colleagues for the trouble he was causing them.

The first paragraph of his suicide note read (quoted in Shimura, 1989): Until yesterday I had no definite intention of killing myself.

About a month later, Suzuki also committed suicide by gas, leaving a note reading: "We promised each other that no matter where we went, we would never be separated.

After Taniyama's death, Goro Shimura stated that: He was always kind to his colleagues, especially to his juniors, and he genuinely cared about their welfare.

Reflecting on this, I am overwhelmed by the bitterest grief.Taniyama was best known for conjecturing, in modern language, automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field.

His work has been influenced by André Weil, who had met Taniyama during the symposiums on algebraic number theory in 1955, in which he became famous after proposing his problems at it.

Owing to the pioneering contribution of Wiles and the efforts of a number of mathematicians, the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture was finally proven in 1999.

The original Taniyama conjecture for elliptic curves over arbitrary number fields remains open.