The books he has purchased, which he estimates make up half of his collection, largely come from secondhand stores. He particularly likes to check bookstores near universities, where professors occasionally sell their used books.

The other half of his collection are books that have been inherited from faculty at Seattle University and UD. According to Nakao, mathematics is “a culture whose foundation rests on the tradition of inheriting previous mathematicians’ book collections.”

“It is common practice for mathematicians to entrust their libraries when they retire or pass away to their students and previous institutions,” Nakao said. “However, as upcoming mathematicians gradually prefer online texts over hardcopies, it falls upon book collectors such as me to ensure the knowledge, wisdom and personalities sketched into books by the former generations survives.”

Nakao takes this charge seriously. While his collection is currently housed within three locations, one of them is his office on campus. There, he keeps several titles for himself and his fellow graduate students to use as an open library for their research and studies.

He considers each book a “piece of the puzzle” that he is trying to complete.

“This puzzle is something abstract and intangible that mathematicians strive to complete despite knowing its completion is unfeasible,” Nakao said. But that won’t stop him from trying to complete it piece by piece, book by book.

Seth Trotter Book Collecting Contest

Nakao earned first place in the 2019 Friends of the University of Delaware Library’s Seth Trotter Book Collecting Contest. The other winners in the book collecting contest were Miriam-Helene Rudd and Sean McAllister. The Friends created the contest to encourage reading and research, the creation of personal libraries, and an appreciation of printed or illustrated works for pleasure and scholarship among UD undergraduate and graduate students. Students can learn more about the 2020 Seth Trotter Student Book Collecting Contest, including how to submit their applications, on this website.