1907-1996

Finnish-American Mathematician

Finnish-born mathematician Lars V. Ahlfors became one of the first two people to receive the Fields Medal in 1936. In awarding the medal, the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) cited Ahlfors's complex analysis work, and in particular his investigations of Riemann surfaces, schematic devices for mapping the relation between complex numbers according to an analytic function. Ahlfors's studies in this area led to developments in meromorphic functions—functions that are analytic everywhere except in a finite number of poles—which in turn spawned a new field of analysis.

Ahlfors's father, Axel, was a mechanical engineering professor at the polytechnical institute in Helsingfors, Finland, where Ahlfors was born on April 8, 1907. Ahlfors's mother, Sievä Helander Ahlfors, died giving birth to him, and the boy grew up close to his father. From an early age, the young Ahlfors took an interest in mathematics, teaching himself...