Gaston Maurice Julia
Born: 3 Feb 1893 in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria
Died: 19 March 1978 in Paris, France
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Gaston Julia was one of the forefathers of modern dynamical systems theory and is best remembered for what is now called the Julia set.
When only 25 when he published his 199 page masterpiece Mémoire sur l'iteration des fonctions rationelles which made him famous in the mathematics centres of his days.
As a soldier in the First World War, Julia had been severely wounded in an attack on the French front designed to celebrate the Kaiser's birthday. Many on both sides were wounder including Julia who lost his nose and had to wear a leather strap across his face for the rest of his life. Between several painful operations he carried on his mathematical researches in hospital.
Later he became a distinguished professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris.
In 1918 Julia published a beautiful paper
Mémoire sur l'itération des fonctions rationnelles, Journal de Math. Pure et Appl. 8 (1918), 47-245
concerning the iteration of a rational function f. Julia gave a precise description of the set J(f) of those z in C for which the n th iterate f
(z) stays bounded as n tends to infinity. It received the Grand Prix de l'Académie des Sciences.
Seminars were organised in Berlin in 1925 to study his work and participants included Brauer, Hopf and Reidemeister. H Cremer produced an essay on his work which included the first visualisation of a Julia set.
Although he was famous in the 1920's, his work was essentially forgotten until B Mandelbrot brought it back to prominence in the 1970's through his fundamental computer experiments.
References elsewhere in this archive:
Show me an example of a Julia set
References:
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