Contents: Schröder, Cayley and Newton's Method - The Next Wave: Korkine and Farkas - Gabriel Koenigs - Iteration in the 1890's: Grévy - Iteration in the 1890's: Leau - The Flower Theorem of Fatou and Julia - Fatou's 1906 Note - Montel's Theory of Normal Families - The Contest - Lattès and Ritt - Fatou and Julia.

The contemporary study of complex dynamics, which has flourished so much in recent years, is based largely upon work by G. Julia (1918) and P. Fatou (1919/20). The goal of this book is to analyze this work from an historical perspective and show in detail, how it grew out of a corpus regarding the iteration of complex analytic functions. This began with investigations by E. Schröder (1870/71) which he made, when he studied Newton's method. In the 1880's, Gabriel Koenigs fashioned this study into a rigorous body of work and, thereby, influenced a lot the subsequent development. But only, when Fatou and Julia applied set theory as well as Paul Montel's theory of normal families, it was possible to develop a global approach to the iteration of rational maps. This book shows, how this intriguing piece of modern mathematics became reality.

Daniel S. Alexander ist Professor an der Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA.