Meromorphic Functions: Progress and Problems

Zürich is a special place to workers in meromorphic function theory. Rolf Nevan-linna was Professor both at the ETH and University of Zürich. His address at the 1932 Zürich ICM centered on connections between his new theory of meromor-phic functions and the Riemann surface of / _ 1, a perspective that continues to yield insights. Lars Ahlfors accompanied Nevanlinna to the ETH in 1928, where he developed his fundamental distortion theorem and proved Denjoy's conjecture that an entire function of order p has at most 2p distinct finite asymptotic values. Zürich has been one of the main venues of the Nevanlinna Colloquia through the years, and the home of Pólya and Pfluger. Goldberg in [20] and (with Levin and Ostrovskii) [22] has produced thorough surveys whose bibliographies contain 862 + 413 entries