Biography
Tadashi Tokieda is the Director of Studies in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical
Statistics at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. He is interested in physics,
particularly related to toys. He invents, collects, and studies toys—simple objects
from daily life that can be found or made, yet which, if played with imaginatively,
exhibit behaviors so surprising that they intrigue scientists for weeks. Born in Japan
and educated in France as a classical philologist, Tokieda is a scholar and polyglot.
In addition to Japanese, French, and English, he knows Greek, Latin, classical Chinese,
Finnish, Spanish, and Russian. He is specialized in the popularization of mathematics
and physics and is an outstanding communicator. Dr. Tokieda delivered a public lecture
at Stony Brook University in 2016 as part of the Della Pietra Lecture series at the
Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.
