Abstract
This book is the first to be devoted to the history of analytic function theory since Brill and Noether published their Bericht über die Entwicklung der Theorie der algebraischen Functionen in älterer und neuerer Zeit in the Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung in 1894. Indeed, because that work leaves out many topics that belong to the theory of analytic functions but not algebraic functions, it can reasonably be argued that our book is the first ever to be written exclusively on this subject. This is rather strange given the importance of analytic function theory within mathematics and the attention that historians of mathematics have paid to the development of the theory of real functions in the nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
A practice he only broke when it came to astronomy.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the following people who helped us—more than perhaps they know—when we were writing this book: Dan Alexander, Tom Archibald, June Barrow-Green, Bruno Belhoste, Bob Burckel, Andrea del Centina, Renaud Chorlay, Harold Edwards, Moritz Epple, Christian Gilain, Helène Gispert, Catherine Goldstein, Steven Krantz, Jesper Lützen, Jean Mawhin, John McCleary, Mario Micallef, David Mond, Raghavan Narasimhan, Phil Rippon, David Rowe, Norbert Schappacher, Erhard Scholz, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Arild Stubhaug, James Tappenden, Peter Ullrich, and Duco van Straten.
We were writing the final revisions of our book when one of us (JJG) was also reading the manuscript of Early days in complex dynamics: A history of complex dynamics in one variable during 1906–1942 by Daniel S. Alexander, Felice Iavernaro, and Alessandro Rosa, which had been submitted to the American and London Mathematical Societies series in the history of mathematics. We gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to compare the results of our research with theirs in the areas of overlap. Their book is now published as (Alexander et al. 2011).
Thanks too to Barbara Beeton, Camilla Jordan, and John Trapp for helpful advice with the TE X and Dahlia Fisch and Elizabeth Loew at Springer for their help and enthusiasm.
We also thank the audience who have listened to one of other of us talk on this material, especially at Oberwolfach meetings and the International Congresses of Mathematicians, and offered helpful criticisms and comments.
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Bottazzini, U., Gray, J. (2013). Introduction. In: Hidden Harmony—Geometric Fantasies. Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5725-1_1
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