Founder of the prestigious international mathematical journal Acta Mathematica and a fixture in the Scandinavian school of mathematics, Magnus Gôsta Mittag-Leffler is also remembered for his work on the analytic representation of a one-valued function, which became the basis of the theorem that bears his name.

The eldest son of a school principal, Mittag-Leffler was born in Stockholm, Sweden on March 16, 1846. His parents recognized the boy's mathematical talents early on. Mittag-Leffler trained as an actuary at the University of Uppsala, where he received his doctorate for a thesis on analytic function theory in 1872 and immediately accepted an offer to work as a lecturer. The period from 1873 to 1876 was a formative one for him, as he studied in Paris and Berlin with such illustrious mathematicians as Charles Hermite, Jules-Henri Poincare, and Karl Thodor Wilhem Weierstrass.

In 1877 Mittag-Leffler finished his teaching preparation (habilitation) with a paper on the...