Lars V. Ahlfors was a mathematician whose major area of research was complex analysis. In 1936, he was one of the first to receive a Fields Medal. Often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal is given every four years to a mathematician under the age of forty who has achieved important results in his or her work. Ahlfors received this award for his work on Riemann surfaces, which are schematic devices for mapping the relation between complex numbers according to an analytic function. Ahlfors's results led to new developments in the field of meromorphic functions (functions that are analytic everywhere in a region except for a finite number of poles); the methods he developed to obtain these results created an entirely new field of analysis.

Lars Valerian Ahlfors was born on April 18, 1907 in Helsingfors (now Helsinki), Finland. His mother, Sievä Helander Ahlfors, died giving...