Description: This user-friendly textbook introduces complex analysis at the beginning graduate or advanced undergraduate level. Unlike other textbooks, it follows Weierstrass' approach, stressing the importance of power series expansions instead of starting with the Cauchy integral formula, an approach that illuminates many important concepts. This view allows readers to quickly obtain and understand many fundamental results of complex analysis, such as the maximum principle, Liouville's theorem, and Schwarz's lemma. The book covers all the essential material on complex analysis, and includes several elegant proofs that were recently discovered. It includes the zipper algorithm for computing conformal maps, as well as a constructive proof of the Riemann mapping theorem, and culminates in a complete proof of the uniformization theorem. Aimed at students with some undergraduate background in real analysis, though not Lebesgue integration, this classroom-tested textbook will teach the skills and intuition necessary to understand this important area of mathematics.
Brief description: Donald E. Marshall is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1976. Professor Marshall is a leading complex analyst with a very strong research record that has been continuously funded throughout his career. He has given invited lectures in over a dozen countries. He is coauthor of the research-level monograph Harmonic Measure (Cambridge, 2005).
Review Quotes: 'Marshall's book covers the basic topics with crystal clarity in a style that is conversational and concrete, and that guides the student into thinking about these topics the way a working mathematician does, especially one with a geometric or computational bent. Moreover, the book includes many results that are vital to modern function theory and its applications to geometry, dynamics and probability, but that are often omitted from introductory texts. I wish I had first learned the subject from this book, and I am delighted that my students can do so.' Christopher Bishop, State University of New York at Stony Brook