, aka S.-Y. Kuroda, was Professor Emeritus
and Research Professor of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 at the University of California, San Diego

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

.
Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

 generative syntax to
the Japanese language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, he is known for the broad range of his work across the language sciences. For instance, in Formal language theory

Formal language

A formal language is a set of words—that is, finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens that are defined in the language. The set from which these letters are taken is the alphabet over which the language is defined. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar...

, the Kuroda normal form

Kuroda normal form

In formal language theory, a grammar is in Kuroda normal form if, and only if, all production rules are of the form:Every grammar in Kuroda normal form is monotonic, and therefore, generates a context-sensitive language. Conversely, every context-sensitive language which does not generate the...

 for context-sensitive grammar

Context-sensitive grammar

A context-sensitive grammar is a formal grammar in which the left-hand sides and right-hand sides of any production rules may be surrounded by a context of terminal and nonterminal symbols...

s bears his name.

Early life and career

Kuroda was born into a prominent family of mathematicians

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 in 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...

.
His grandfather, Teiji Takagi

Teiji Takagi

Teiji Takagi was a Japanese mathematician, best known for proving the Takagi existence theorem in class field theory....

 studied under David Hilbert

David Hilbert

David Hilbert was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of...

. Kuroda himself
received degrees in mathematics and linguistics from the University of Tokyo

University of Tokyo

, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...

.
In 1962, he entered MIT with the first graduating class from the new Department of Linguistics,
where he wrote his seminal dissertation, Generative Studies in the Japanese Language (1965)
under Chomsky's supervision.

Important publications

• "Classes of languages and linear-bounded automata", Information and Control, 7(2): 207–223, June 1964.