Yang Lo – författare

The International Congress of Mathematicians was an historical event that was held at the Morningside Center of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing). It was the first occasion where Chinese mathematicians from all over the world gathered to present their research. The Morningside Mathematics lectures were given by R. Borcherds, J. Coates, R. Graham, and D. Stroock. Other distinguished speakers included J.-P. Bourguignon, J. Jost, M. Taylor, and S. L. Lee. Topics covered in the volume include algebra and representation theory, algebraic geometry, number theory and automorphic forms, Riemannian geometry and geometric analysis, mathematical physics, topology, complex analysis and complex geometry, computational mathematics, and combinatorics.

It is well known that solving certain theoretical or practical problems often depends on exploring the behavior of the roots of an equation such as (1) J(z) = a, where J(z) is an entire or meromorphic function and a is a complex value. It is especially important to investigate the number n(r, J = a) of the roots of (1) and their distribution in a disk Izl ~ r, each root being counted with its multiplicity. It was the research on such topics that raised the curtain on the theory of value distribution of entire or meromorphic functions. In the last century, the famous mathematician E. Picard obtained the pathbreaking result: Any non-constant entire function J(z) must take every finite complex value infinitely many times, with at most one excep­ tion. Later, E. Borel, by introducing the concept of the order of an entire function, gave the above result a more precise formulation as follows. An entire function J (z) of order A( 0 < A < (0) satisfies -1'' logn(r, J = a) \ 1m = 1\ r->oo logr for every finite complex value a, with at most one exception. This result, generally known as the Picard-Borel theorem, lay the foundation for the theory of value distribution and since then has been the source of many research papers on this subject.