This book is a history of complex function theory from its origins to 1914, when the essential features of the modern theory were in place. It is the first history of mathematics devoted to complex function theory, and it draws on a wide range of published and unpublished sources. In addition to an extensive and detailed coverage of the three founders of the subject Cauchy, Riemann, and Weierstrass it looks at the contributions of authors from d Alembert to Hilbert, and Laplace to Weyl.

Particular chapters examine the rise and importance of elliptic function theory, differential equations in the complex domain, geometric function theory, and the early years of complex function theory in several variables. Unique emphasis has been devoted to the creation of a textbook tradition in complex analysis by considering some seventy textbooks in nine different languages. The book is not a mere sequence of disembodied results and theories, but offers a comprehensive picture of the broad cultural and social context in which the main actors lived and worked by paying attention to the rise of mathematical schools and of contrasting national traditions.

The book is unrivaled for its breadth and depth, both in the core theory and its implications for other fields of mathematics. It documents the motivations for the early ideas and their gradual refinement into a rigorous theory. "

Complex Analysis is the powerful fusion of the complex numbers (involving the 'imaginary' square root of -1) with ordinary calculus, resulting in a tool that has been of central importance to science for more than 200 years. This book brings this majestic and powerful subject to life by consistently using geometry (not calculation) as the means of explanation. The 501 diagrams of the original edition embodied geometrical arguments that (for the first time) replaced the long and often opaque computations of the standard approach, in force for the previous 200 years, providing direct, intuitive, visual access to the underlying mathematical reality. This new 25th Anniversary Edition introduces brand-new captions that fully explain the geometrical reasoning, making it possible to read the work in an entirely new way—as a highbrow comic book!

After the pioneering work on complex dynamics by Fatou and Julia in the early 20th century, Noel Baker went on to lay the foundations of transcendental complex dynamics. As one of the leading exponents of transcendental dynamics, he showed how developments in complex analysis such as Nevanlinna theory could be applied. His work has inspired many others to take up this increasingly active subject, and will continue to do so. Presenting papers by researchers in transcendental dynamics and complex analysis, this book is written in honour of Noel Baker. The papers describe the state of the art in this subject, with new results on completely invariant domains, wandering domains, the exponential parameter space, and normal families. The inclusion of comprehensive survey articles on dimensions of Julia sets, buried components of Julia sets, Baker domains, Fatou components of functions of small growth, and ergodic theory of transcendental meromorphic functions means this is essential reading for students and researchers in complex dynamics and complex analysis.