I would like to add an "illustration" for this from the services on January 4th in St. Louis.Akira Takayama passed away January 2, 1996. A private ceremony was held on January 4; a memorial service and luncheon were held on February 4, 1996, at the SIUC Touch of Nature Environmental Center located south of Carbondale. Another memorial was planned for March 2, 1996, in Tokyo.
Akira is survived by his wife, Machiko, who may be reached in care of the Department of Economics.
A profile of Akira that appeared in an issue of the newsletter produced and distributed by the graduate students in the Department of Economics is below..
Also below are thoughts and reflections on our late colleague, Akira Takayama. The contributions are from the following among Akira's many friends:
Also appearing here is a note of thanks from Mrs. Machiko Takayama.
Note: The following profile appeared in the graduate students' newsletter. It was prepared by Julius Horvath and Don Stribling
Professor Takayama received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1962, one of the first two students to be graduated from the then-new Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Rochester. His dissertation director was Professor Ronald W. Jones, now the Xerox Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester.
In 1971, while at the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University, Professor Takayama completed International Trade: An Approach to the Theory, which was published in 1972 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
In 1973, while still at Purdue's Krannert School, Professor Takayama completed the first edition of Mathematical Economics, a modern classic that is one of the standard references in the field of mathematical economics; Mathematical Economics is now in its second edition, published by Cambridge University Press.
Professor Takayama came to Southern Illinois University in 1982 as the Vandeveer Professor of Economics, the first endowed professorship at SIUC. After coming to SIUC, Professor Takayama revised Mathematical Economics (2nd edition ©1985) and wrote another book in the area of mathematics-and-economics, Analytical Methods in Economics, this for the University of Michigan Press (©1993).
Colleagues and former students will no doubt recall Akira's teaching style, described as "dogged" by his administrative assistant of many years, Don Stribling. Former students in general, and dissertation students in particular, may recall Akira's "signature" expression, "That all b.s." (paraphrased here, of course). Some probably know that Akira had the expression sewn into his jacket lining and employed it often via a rubber stamp given him by some graduate students.
Few could deny that Akira was driven by his heart when it came to his students; he truly wanted them to learn. Indeed, Analytical Methods in Economics was created to be a textbook for his mathematical economics students as a more accessible resource when the original work, Mathematical Economics, was out of reach.
In addition to the many books he has written, edited and co-edited, Professor Takayama has published a large volume of papers in the areas of macroeconomics, microeconomics, mathematical economics, and international trade and finance. He has also served his discipline as a teacher and member of the editorial boards of many journals.
Thoughts and Reflections
I often find myself reflecting upon Akira's example, his excitement for research, and upon his friendship.
I took every class Akira taught at Purdue and loved each one. His efforts to summarize the material, to prepare detailed notes, and his concern for students were deeply appreciated. His remarkable teaching ability not only strengthened the students he taught, but is having a second and third-generation effect as many of us have tried to emulate his example.
His excitement about research and his commitment to extend frontiers of knowledge was contagious. After getting to know Akira, research was just something you wanted to do because of the excitement of discovery.
Akira was a friend and confident. In 1976 Akira and Machiko spent a semester at BYU where we enjoyed their intellectual enthusiasm, humor, love of life, and love of skiing. Most years after that, Akira and Machiko would make an annual pilgrimage to the ski slopes in Utah. On another occasion after attending some econometrics meetings in Japan, Akira graciously took several days and showed me some of the beautiful sights in Japan.
I think of Akira often and gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness and appreciation for the impact he and Machiko have had on my professional and personal life.
-- Jim McDonald, Brigham Young University
Akira was one of the sweetest people I have ever known. I first met him when I was a graduate student in the late 1970s. Of course, I was bowled over by his presentation, and imagined him as a Japanese battleship, and a totally logical one at that.
Over the next five years, Akira offered marvelous feedback on my research in trade theory. Then the fun started. Twice, Akira came to the economics departments where I was working and interviewed for "eminent scholar" positions. Never have I met anyone who enjoyed life so much. Eating and drinking were clearly among Akira's comparative advantages.
Akira expressed regret once that he did not buy some real estate in Tokyo when it was dirt cheap back in the late 1960s. Instead, he bought a Dodge Dart (which he drove for 25 years). Had he bought the land and become wealthy, think of all the beautiful economics which might not have been written and scribbled on boards.
Akira's influence on the profession will be long felt. For those who were lucky enough to know him, he can never be replaced.
-- Henry Thompson, Economics Department, Auburn University
I was genuinely saddened by the news of Akira Takayama's death. He was a warm human being, a serious and deep scholar. It is a real loss to mathematical economics, and economics in general.
-- Leonid Hurwicz, Professor of Economics and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Minnesota
I met Akira Takayama for the first time one Summer afternoon in 1966 at Purdue University where he was beginning his appointment as Professor of Economics, and where I was finishing my year as a visiting Assistant Professor and preparing to leave for Egypt to work for the Minister of Treasury there. After barely half an hour we were working together on a large number of research projects. In fact I never went back to my house that day. We spent all night writing papers. Since I could not type, Akira had to divide his time between the chalkboard and the typewriter.
About 11:00 AM the following day we decided that we decided (OK, I decided) that we had done enough and left the output scattered on one of those large tables in a seminar room at the Krannert Building. I weathered the storm of anger from my mother-in-law and my wife on my return home but had to get some sleep since we were to start at 4:00 that afternoon. We did start work but only after spending the better part of an hour searching the trash bin of the building for the fruits of last night's toil. We did find most of what the janitors had carted away and reconstructed the rest of it. We got good starts on at least three papers in those 48 hours: one appeared in Metroeconomica which, unrecognized, provides a foundation for a method of computing general equilibria and one on a continuum of traders which I still have to finish and will, and one presented at Econometric Society meetings in Toronto in 1966 (?) with Professor Hurwicz as discussant (I am glad that Akira was the one who presented it).
Needless to say, this chance encounter (most likely planned by our mutual friend Professor Stanley Reiter) saved my intellectual life. It was the beginning of a 25-year long collaboration and a solid friendship that had its ups and downs, but which always was there. My work with Akira that summer had one other wonderful consequence: all the packing and preparation for my return to Egypt (26 boxes of books alone) was volunteered away to Soad (my poor wife) and her mother who insisted on talking to Akira in Arabic and he to her in English but they understood each other perfectly due to the loud argumentative tone of voice they both were experts at. As Machiko and others (including wives of privileged friends, e.g., Junko Otani and Soad) would attest, Akira thought it only natural that tasks such as packing, preparing his income tax return should be delegated with or without the consent of chosen ones.
I will mention one more instance of Akira's doing. When I went to Egypt, I had intended to come back out and work in Kansas for a few years. The Egyptian government, much more of a police state then, would not let me go (that government had a 3,000 year of history of not letting people go). Akira managed to get to Cairo and to take back a message from me to our friend Jim Quirk in Kansas that they should invite me to the departmental seminar on Wednesday. I received an official invitation every week and submitted it to the authorities requesting permission to leave for two days to attend. Eventually, they let me and I never went back to stay. I hope my current colleagues in Kansas will forgive Akira this act.
Akira's departure leaves a gaping hole in my own life and in that of economics, which we could ill afford in these times of severe scarcity,
-- Mohamed El-Hodiri, Professor of Economics, Russian and East European Studies, African and Afro-American Studies and Associate Director, Institute of Public Policy and Business Research. University of Kansas.
Professor Takayama taught me at Rochester during 1969-70, when he was a visitor to the Department of Economics and I was a graduate student in the first year of the doctoral program. He taught us the compulsory Micro II, perhaps the course number was 472 during the spring of 1970 (why they called it spring in Rochester, I have never quite figured out); it was a bad winter even by Rochester standards and I remember having to trudge through snow to make it to Professor Takayama's class which used to meet at 9AM. This was about the time that he was preparing the manuscript on Mathematical Economics and we were privileged to receive copies of his chapters and notes as handouts which were discussed in class. The compulsory Micro II was supposed to have been taught by Professor Jones in most years then and we were told that we had missed a treat as Professor Jones was on sabbatical that year and that is how Professor Takayama came to be taking the course. Those who have looked into Mathematical Economics, would realize how much material there is in the book and we got all of it. It was truly an experience to be taught by him and his command over everything was really awesome. The most stupendous part of the course was the exam; the exam was supposed to have been for three hours. The question paper ran into four single-spaced pages and it was clear to us that three hours was too little. Some of us wrote for almost six hours and did not get to the end; I remember that I gave up after six and a half hours.
The next day, everyone was talking about Takayama's exam; he, typically found nothing wrong about the length of his test: one set of questions were of the type that Jones used to ask in the course; another set was of the type that Hurwicz would ask in Minnesota; and then there was those that Takayama himself would ask at Purdue and Rochester was supposed to be at least as good as any of these places, what then were our problems? We did have problems of course, but we also learnt a lot.
Thank you Professor Takayama for taking the effort for teaching a course such as the one you did.
Encountering Professor Takayama in the coffee lounge, one would be asked, what have you proven today? And if one said something it would be followed up and argued through. I have been now teaching for a longish spell myself, and I realize that Professor Takayama was always teaching, even in the coffee-lounge.
I last met him some years ago, probably at the 1989 Congress of the Econometric Society (the Far Eastern Meeting) at Kyoto. When I met him (it was about twenty years since he had taught me and I was not too sure whether he would remember me), not only did he remember me, he introduced me to Professor Negishi and did mention that I had been a student who had managed to do well in his course. I was just feeling relieved when he immediately launched into the familiar "what have you proven today?" And the argument about the paper that I was supposed to be giving the next day was as sharp as ever. He was great person and a great teacher.
-- Anjan Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Akira Takayama, or "Tak" as he was commonly referred to, was a wonderful teacher. Though he greatly relished giving rigorous lectures, he rarely failed to also provide a crystal clear statement of the intuition underlying the point he was making. I especially enjoyed the way he frequently spiced his lectures with anecdotes about how certain results came about. Perhaps the greatest complement I can pay is to say that he influenced the way I teach technical material.
Tak, however, was more than a marvelous teacher -- he was an engaging character about whom countless stories are told by many graduate students. He loved to socialize with graduate students and many times had a hearty laugh at our expense.
Although I did not regularly communicate with him after finishing my graduate work at Purdue, I always made it a point to see if he might be attending a conference that I was attending. If I was lucky enough to meet up with him, we would usually get together for a beer or two and talk about old times or current work. I will miss looking for him.
-- Dennis Fixler, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
I met Prof. Akira Takayama at Maple Grove Guest House at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo where he served three years until he passed away.
Though I was next door, I could not see him during daytime since I found he worked overnight later. One day I saw him with ski jacket and he told he just came back from Nigata ski resort.
Before he was hospitalized in a hospital near ICU last summer, I asked him to give me his comment on my paper, "A Simple Dynamic Solution to a Politician's Dilemma between Unemployment and Environment." He told me to come his office about 9:00 PM and he asked me to explain about the paper in a seminar room. As soon as I explained the idea on the paper, he gave me very important feedback which led me to improve the paper. When I visited him at the hospital, he asked about my research progress. Indeed, he was a great sensei (Professor in Japanese) for a young scholar.
Being a graduate from the International Christian University in Tokyo, he committed himself for the ICU. He was a devoted researcher and teacher who received a lot of respect from young ICU students.
I truly miss him.
-- Sungsup Ra, International Christian University
I met "Tak" my first day as a graduate student at Purdue. He gave me "chicken-scratch" notes (his handwriting, at least in English, was, well far worse than mine) and said to clean them up so the secretary could type them. I imagine I impressed him greatly when I asked him "What is an n-tuple?" I worked for him that first year, and learned a great deal from reading/reworking the notes on Mathematical Economics and International Trade (1968-1969). I never cease to be amazed that he could digest so much literature and then coherently spit it out, even after drinking us all under the table the night before. I still reference both books. I wish Tak had written another with game theory and stochastic problems.
I only took Macro from Tak but sat in from time to time in the math econ lectures. However, I still recall much of those lectures, a testament to his prowess in the classroom. I also recall watching chalk dust literally leap from the blackboard to his suit.
More importantly, for ignorant graduate students such as me, Tak socialized with us and hence became approachable. He both showed us where our ignorance was and removed it.
Among many stories I could tell, one that sticks out was when I had the honor of inviting Tak to give a lecture here. At that lecture were five generations of teacher-students -- each generation had taught all of the generations "under." Tak was actually the second generation, while I was a third (Dick Rosett was a first, Art Denzau a fourth and numerous fifth generation current students -- one of them had had classes from us all). Needless to say, there was beer after the seminar.
Tak started my education, was on my committee and was a friend. With every Pete's Wicked Ale from this point on, I will toast him as a mentor and friend and will greatly miss his presence.
-- Bob Parks, Department of Economics, Washington University in St. Louis
I only recently learned that one of my favorite professors from my Purdue days has passed away. The word will no doubt spread more slowly through the agricultural economics community, but I wanted to be sure it was said that those of us who knew Professor Takayama when we were graduate students in agricultural economics at Purdue remember him very fondly as well.
I took all of his courses in trade, macro, and mathematical economics, and he wrote half of my Ph.D. prelim exam on trade theory. He also served as a minor member on my graduate committee. What a truly memorable fellow ... the classes late in the day, seeing him going home early in the morning when many of us were coming in, the perennial whimsical smile, the shuffling and untied shoes, a puff of chalk dust usually in the air, and always a mind sharp as a tack. His teaching and style had as profound an effect on me as any of my Purdue professors. It saddens me to think that future students at SIU or anywhere will not have the same benefit.
-- Andrew M. Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics and Chair, Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, Cornell University
Note of Thanks from Mrs. Machiko Takayama
Date: Monday, February 12, 1996
From: Akira Takayama's wife, Machiko Takayama, Carbondale, IL USA
To: Akira's Friends
Subject: My Appreciation of Your Condolences On My Husband's Passing
To all of Akira's friends, thank you for your warm condolences sent to me over the last month via the Internet, also for your letters, cards, and flowers, and finally for your attendance at his memorial service at SIUC on February 4th, one arriving from as far away as Greece. I would like to write a thank you letter to each of you in person and I would like to send pictures of you that Akira took in the good-old-days. But for now, please forgive me for expressing my thanks in this manner.
Briefly, for me Akira was a difficult teddy bear, sometimes moody by always lovable, funny, and cheerful, even until the last moment. He passed away without suffering from pain or weight loss. At one time I asked him, if something should happen, to whom he would like to say good-bye. He mentioned many of your names. Thank you for somehow knowing and for your understanding.
I know Akira would have liked Bob Parks' "lecture summary" on this page:
"Always remember: Inertia has no effect on the ultimate steady state solution. I would like to add an "illustration" for this from the services on January 4th in St. Louis.
Thank you, Bob, and now let us all go have a beer just once more!
--Machiko Takayama
P.S. A Memorial Service is being held on March 2nd (Saturday, Japan time) at International Christian University in Tokyo
P.P.S. I appreciate Professor Thom Mitchell of SIUC for voluntarily setting up this web page for Akira.
Death Notice from the Local Newspaper
Akira Takayama
CARBONDALE--Akira Takayama, 63, incumbent professor of the Vandeveer Chair of Economics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, passed away Jan. 2, 1996, in Barnes Hospital in St. Louis of lymphoma cancer.
Dr. Takayama had held the chair as Vandeveer Professor since 1983 and had been a professor of economics since the early 1960s. He was listed in Who's Who in America for a long time and his concepts were included in the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, wherein he expressed his desire for unifying the various theories of economics. His academic publications include Mathematical Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1985), International Trade (Dryden Press, 1972), and Analytical Methods in Economics (University of Michigan Press, 1995), in addition to his numerous articles in professional journals. He received the Best Book of the Year Award in Economics in Japan in 1974 and shared the Daeyang Prize in Korea in 1991 with one of his students. He was recognized as an international scholar and respected for his mathematical clarity. His textbooks were considered graduate school standards.
Dr. Takayama was a member of the faculties of University of Manchester, Minn., Rochester, Australian National University, University of Tokyo, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, University of Kyoto, Tulane, Brigham Young and International Christian Universities.
He was born in Yokohama, Japan. He earned his bachelors degree in economics at International Christian University in Tokyo, his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Rochester, N.Y., and his second doctorate in economics from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.
Private funeral services were held Jan. 4 in a chapel in Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. Memorial services will be held Feb. 4 at SIUC and March 2 in Tokyo.
Among his survivors are his wife of 25 years, Machiko Takayama, three brothers and a sister.
-Southern Illinoisan, February 2, 1996
If you have anything to share about Akira that would be appropriate to add to this page, please send email to Professor Mitchell. Thank you.
I thank Rob Jensen and Bob Hageman in the Dean's office of the College of Liberal Arts for their help in producing this Web page. The image above appears at the request of Machiko Takayama, Prof. Takayama's widow. --TM