Lars Ahlfors

Biography

Early life and education

Ahlfors was born in Helsinki, Finland. His mother, Sievä Helander, died at his birth. His father, Karl Axel Mauritz Ahlfors, was a professor of engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. The Ahlfors family was Swedish-speaking, so he first attended the private school Nya svenska samskolan where all classes were taught in Swedish. Ahlfors studied at the University of Helsinki from 1924, graduating in 1928 having studied under Ernst Lindelöf and Rolf Nevanlinna. In the autumn of 1928 he travelled with Nevanlinna to Zurich, where Nevanlinna had been invited to fill a vacant professorship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Ahlfors later emphasised the importance of this journey, which brought him from the periphery of Europe to its mathematical centre. He assisted Nevanlinna with his work on Denjoy's conjecture on the number of asymptotic values of an entire function, and in 1929 published the first proof of this conjecture, now known as the Denjoy–Carleman–Ahlfors theorem. He completed his doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1930.

Academic career

Ahlfors began his academic career at Åbo Akademi and was appointed associate professor of mathematics at the University of Helsinki in 1933. In 1935–1936 Ahlfors was a visiting researcher at Harvard University. In 1936 he was one of the first two people to be awarded the Fields Medal (the other was Jesse Douglas). The prize committee noted that Ahlfors was one of the most brilliant representatives of the Finnish school of function theory founded by Ernst Lindelöf, which over thirty years had made many valuable contributions to mathematics and produced so many outstanding mathematicians. When offered an associate professorship at Harvard, he left his position at the University of Helsinki in autumn 1936. He returned to Finland in 1938 to take up a Swedish-language professorship in mathematics at the University of Helsinki.

War years and emigration

The outbreak of war in 1939 led to problems although Ahlfors was unfit for military service. He sent his family to Sweden and continued to fulfil his professorial duties at the university. Foreseeing difficult times ahead for Finland in the summer of 1944, he indicated his wish to move to Zurich and joined his family in Sweden to await developments. He was offered a position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich and finally managed to travel there in March 1945, at which point he resigned his professorship in Helsinki. He did not enjoy his time in Switzerland, so in 1946 he accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1977; he was William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics from 1964. Ahlfors was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1962 and again in 1966. He was awarded the Wihuri International Prize in 1968 and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1981, whose citation concluded that every function theorist active at the time was in some measure a student of Ahlfors. He served as the Honorary President of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986 at Berkeley, California, in celebration of his 50th year of the award of his Fields Medal.