Shizuo Kakutani was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1940-1942 and after the war in 1948-49. Kakutani first came to the IAS upon invitation from Hermann Weyl and worked amongst the great minds of John Von Neumann, Hideki Yukawa, and Freeman Dyson. Prior to coming to IAS he received his PhD in 1941 from Osaka University which is where he returned to teach after fleeing the United States. When Kakutani left the United States by boat, he did not want to leave the Institute for Advanced Study. As seen in his personal letters, he vowed that he would return again after the war was over. While on the M.S Gripsholm, Kakutani faced the fear every day that the ship taking him home would be torpedoed. It has been said that Kakutani would write messages in a bottle with mathematical equations and throw them overboard with instructions to return the message to the Institute for Advanced Study. While none of the bottled messages were ever recovered, Kakutani did get the chance to return to IAS in 1948. After he finished his second term in 1949, he accepted a position at Yale University. While at Yale he was awarded the DeVane medal, a students choice medal awarded to him by the undergraduates in the year 1968.