慧 渡辺
Satosi Watanabe was born on May 26, 1910, in Tokyo, Japan. His father, Chifuyu Watanabe, was a Minister of Justice at Second Wakatsuki Cabinet. His elder brother, Takeshi Watanabe, was Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs and director general of Asia Development Bank.
Satoshi Watanabe attended Gakushuuin Middle High School and Tokyo High School. In 1933, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in theoretical physics, where Torahiko Terada was his teacher.
The imperial government sent him to France to study. Louis de Broglie encouraged Watanabe to study thermodynamics and wave mechanics.
In 1937, he moved to Leipzig and started to study nuclear theory under Heisenberg. In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, he left Germany and stayed with Niels Bohr for a time. In December, he returned to Japan with his family.
In Japan, Satoshi Watanabe worked at the Physical and Chemical Research Institute (Rikagaku Kenkyujo) at Tokyo Imperial University as an assistant professor, and as a physics professor at Rikkyo University. In 1950, he left for the United States.
In 1956, he became a researcher at the IBM Watson Laboratory and started to build his own information theory based on quantum mechanics. He taught at Yale University and the University of Hawaii, became chairman of the International Time Academy, and was the Vice President of International Philosophy Academy.
On October 15, 1993, he died in Tokyo.
Satoshi Watanabe married Dorothea Dauer, a scholar of German literature.
