Non-Euclidean Geometry in the Theory of Automorphic Functions

Book excerpt: This is the English translation of a volume originally published only in Russian and now out of print. The book was written by Jacques Hadamard on the work of Poincare. Poincare's creation of a theory of automorphic functions in the early 1880s was one of the most significant mathematical achievements of the nineteenth century. It directly inspired the uniformization theorem, led to a class of functions adequate to solve all linear ordinary differential equations, and focused attention on a large new class of discrete groups. It was the first significant application of non-Euclidean geometry. This unique exposition by Hadamard offers a fascinating and intuitive introduction to the subject of automorphic functions and illuminates its connection to differential equations, a connection not often found in other texts.