A History of Complex Dynamics

Download or read book A History of Complex Dynamics written by Daniel S. Alexander and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary study of complex dynamics, which has flourished so much in recent years, is based largely upon work by G. Julia (1918) and P. Fatou (1919/20). The goal of this book is to analyze this work from an historical perspective and show in detail, how it grew out of a corpus regarding the iteration of complex analytic functions. This began with investigations by E. Schröder (1870/71) which he made, when he studied Newton's method. In the 1880's, Gabriel Koenigs fashioned this study into a rigorous body of work and, thereby, influenced a lot the subsequent development. But only, when Fatou and Julia applied set theory as well as Paul Montel's theory of normal families, it was possible to develop a global approach to the iteration of rational maps. This book shows, how this intriguing piece of modern mathematics became reality.