Visual Complex Analysis

Sir Roger Penrose
Visual Complex Analysis is a delight, and a book after my own heart. By his innovative and exclusive use of the geometrical perspective, Tristan Needham uncovers many surprising and largely unappreciated aspects of the beauty of complex analysis.

Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society ...it is comparable with Feynman's Lectures on Physics. At every point it asks "why" and finds a beautiful visual answer.

Times Higher Education Supplement Newton would have approved... a fascinating and refreshing look at a familiar subject... essential reading for anybody with any interest at all in this absorbing area of mathematics.

Ian Stewart, New Scientist One of the saddest developments in school mathematics has been the downgrading of the visual for the formal. I'm not lamenting the loss of traditional Euclidean geometry, despite its virtues, because it too emphasised stilted formalities. But to replace our rich visual tradition by silly games with 2 x 2 matrices has always seemed to me to be the height of folly. It is therefore a special pleasure to see Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis with its elegantly illustrated visual approach. Yes, he has 2 x 2 matrices--but his are interesting.

Paul Zorn, American Mathematical Monthly
an engaging, broad, thorough, and often deep, development of undergraduate complex analysis and related areas from a geometric point of view. The style is lucid, informal, reader-friendly, and rich with helpful images (e.g. the complex derivative as an "amplitwist"). A truly unusual and notably creative look at a classical subject.

Mathematical Gazette If your budget limits you to only buying one mathematics book in a year then make sure that this is the one that you buy.

Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios I was delighted when I came across Visual Complex Analysis. As soon as I thumbed through it, I realized that this was the book I was looking for ten years ago.

Frank Farris, American Mathematical Monthly The new ideas and exercises bring together a body of information potentially invaluable to researchers in fields from topology to number theory... this is only the beginning of a long list of famous facts for which Needham offers attractive visual proofs: Cauchy's theorem is a satisfying example: you can see the contribution to the integral from each infinitesimal square vanish before your eyes.


David Armitage, Mathematical Reviews This informal style is excellently judged and works extremely well. Many of the arguments presented will be new even to experts, and the book will be of great interest to professionals working in either complex analysis or in any field where complex analysis is used.

MAA Reviews The arguments constructed are highly innovative; even veterans of the field will find new ideas here. This is a special book. Tristan Needham has not only completely rethought a classical field of...

Tristan Needham (son of the distinguished social anthropologist Rodney Needham) grew up in Oxford, England. He studied physics at Merton College, Oxford, before moving to the Mathematical Institute, where he enjoyed the great privilege of studying black holes under the supervision of Sir Roger Penrose. Tristan received his DPhil in 1987 and joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco in 1989. His continuing mission is to seek out new intuitive forms of understanding, and new visualizations.