was a Japanese computer scientist and graph drawing

Graph drawing

Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs arising from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, and bioinformatics...

 researcher.

Biography

Sugiyama was born on September 17, 1945 in Gifu Prefecture

Gifu Prefecture

is a prefecture located in the Chūbu region of central Japan. Its capital is the city of Gifu.Located in the center of Japan, it has long played an important part as the crossroads of Japan, connecting the east to the west through such routes as the Nakasendō...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

.
He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Nagoya University

Nagoya University

Nagoya University is one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. It can be seen in the several rankings such as shown below.-General Rankings:...

, earning a doctorate in 1974. He then worked for Fujitsu until 1997, when he became a professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. At JAIST, he became a center director in 1998, dean in 2000, and vice president in 2008. He died on June 10, 2011.

In the 1990s, Sugiyama also served as one of the directors of the Information Processing Society of Japan.

Research

Sugiyama is best known for his work with Tagawa and Toda introducing layered graph drawing

Layered graph drawing

Layered graph drawing is a type of graph drawing in which the vertices of a directed graph are drawn in horizontal rows or layers with the edges generally directed downwards...

, now also known as Sugiyama-style graph drawing. Sugiyama also wrote highly-cited papers on other topics in graph drawing including maintenance of the "mental map" when a drawing is modified, drawings that simultaneously display both the adjacencies between vertices in a graph and a hierarchical structure on the same vertices, and the control of edge orientations in force-based algorithms.

Books

Sugiyama was the author of several books on graph drawing and knowledge engineering. His book Graph drawing and applications for software and knowledge engineers (World Scientific, Series on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 11, 2002, ISBN 978-981-02-4879-6) is a translation into English of a 1992 Japanese book that was the first book in any language on the subject of graph drawing. His book Knowledge Science (with Atsushi Shimojima and Akiya Nagata) was also translated into Korean (BADA Publishing, 2005).