| When published in 1929, Ford's book was the first treatise in English on automorphic functions. By this time the field was already fifty years old, as marked from the time of Poincaré's early Acta papers that essentially created the subject. The work of Koebe and Poincaré on uniformization appeared in 1907. In the seventy years since its first publication, Ford's Automorphic Functions has become a classic. His approach to automorphic functions is primarily through the theory of analytic functions. He begins with a review of the theory of groups of linear transformations, especially Fuchsian groups. He covers the classical elliptic modular functions, as examples of non-elementary automorphic functions and Poincaré theta series. Ford includes an extended discussion of conformal mappings from the point of view of functions, which prepares the way for his treatment of uniformization. The final chapter illustrates the connections between automorphic functions and differential equations with regular singular points, such as the hypergeometric equation. |