Editing Lars Ahlfors (section)

==Career==
Ahlfors worked as an associate professor at the [[University of Helsinki]] from 1933 to 1936. In 1936 he was one of the first two people to be awarded the [[Fields Medal]]<ref name="Obit"/><ref name="Obit2"/> (the other was [[Jesse Douglas]]). In 1935 Ahlfors visited [[Harvard University]].<ref name="Obit2"/> He returned to [[Finland]] in 1938 to take up a professorship at the University of Helsinki. The outbreak of war in 1939 led to problems although Ahlfors was unfit for military service. He was offered a position at the [[ETH Zurich|Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich]] in 1944 and finally managed to travel there in March 1945. He did not enjoy his time in [[Switzerland]], so in 1946 he jumped at a chance to leave, returning to work at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1977;<ref name="Obit"/><ref name="Obit2"/> he was William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics from 1964. Ahlfors was a visiting scholar at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] in 1962 and again in 1966.<ref>[http://www.ias.edu/people/cos/ Institute for Advanced Study: A Community of Scholars]</ref> He was awarded the Wihuri Prize in 1968 and the [[Wolf Prize in Mathematics]] in 1981. He served as the Honorary President of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986 at [[Berkeley, California]], in celebration of his 50th year of the award of his Fields Medal.

His book ''Complex Analysis'' (1953) is the classic text on the subject and is almost certainly referenced in any more recent text which makes heavy use of complex analysis. Ahlfors wrote several other significant books, including ''Riemann surfaces'' (1960)<ref>{{cite journal|author=Springer, George|author-link=George Springer (mathematician)|title=Review of ''Riemann surfaces''. By Lars V. Ahlfors and Leo Sario|journal=Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.|volume=67|issue=2|pages=170–171|url=https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1961-67-02/S0002-9904-1961-10548-X/S0002-9904-1961-10548-X.pdf|doi=10.1090/S0002-9904-1961-10548-X|doi-access=free}}</ref> and ''Conformal invariants'' (1973).
He made decisive contributions to [[meromorphic]] curves, [[value distribution theory]], [[Riemann surface]]s, [[conformal geometry]], [[quasiconformal mapping]]s and other areas during his career.