Shoshichi Kobayashi was born January 4, 1932 in Kofu, Japan. After obtaining his mathematics degree from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, he held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, at MIT and at the University of British Columbia between 1956 and 1962, and then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now Professor in the Graduate School.

Kobayashi's research spans the areas of differential geometry of real and complex variables, and his numerous resulting publications include several book: Foundations of Differential Geometry with N. Nomizu, Hyperbolic Complex Manifolds and Holomorphic mappings and Differential Geometry of Complex Vector Bundles.