Hiroshi Toda

Hiroshi Toda (born 1928) is a Japanese mathematician, who specializes in stable and unstable homotopy theory.He started publishing in 1952. Many of his early papers are concerned with the study of Whitehead products and their behaviour under suspension and more generally with the (unstable) homotopy groups of spheres. In a 1957 paper he showed the first non-existence result for the Hopf invariant 1 problem. This period of his work culminated in his book Composition methods in homotopy groups of spheres (1962). Here he uses as important tools the Toda bracket (which he calls the toric construction) and the Toda fibration, among others, to compute the first 20 nontrivial homotopy groups for each sphere.