Ichiro Yokota was awarded a Doctor of Science degree (Topology of classical Lie groups) from Osaka University in 1959. He was an Assistant, Lecturer and then Associate Professor at Osaka City University (1950-1966), Professor at Shinshu University (1966-1990) and Visiting Professor at Tamkang University (1976-1977). In 1990, he became a Professor Emeritus at Shinshu University. With O. Shukuzawa, he realized the non-compact connected and compact simply connected exceptional Lie groups of type E6 (1979-1980), improving on H. Freudenthal's constructions. His publications include the book "Groups and Topology" (Shokabo, 1971) on cellular decompositions of classical Lie groups. Professor Yokota died on November 10th, 2017.

The editors of this book have been disciples of the late Professor since 1976. In his words, "Our motivation is to study everything related to exceptional Lie groups".