[112] Lars Valerian Ahlfors (1907–1996)

Lars Valerian Ahlfors was arguably the preeminent complex function theorist of the twentieth century. With a career spanning more than sixty years, Ahlfors made decisive contributions to areas ranging from meromorphic curves to value distribution theory, Riemann surfaces, conformal geometry, extremal length, quasiconformal mappings, and Kleinian groups ([7] serves as a map of Ahlfors’s contributions to the subject). Ahlfors was both role model and mentor to his graduate students and to the many mathematicians around the world who learned from his example. He is remembered warmly, both as a mathematician and as a man.