Paul Montel

Paul Antoine Aristide Montel was a French mathematician, born in Nice on 29 April 1876, who died in Paris on 22 January 1975. He researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis and was a student of Emile Borel at the Sorbonne. His most important contribution was the introduction and systematic development of the notion of normal family, set out in a very influential book that also contains the first exposition in book form of the results of Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia on holomorphic dynamics. The notion of normal family was a predecessor of the notion of compact space introduced by Pavel Alexandrov and Pavel Urysohn in 1929. Henri Cartan, Jean Dieudonne and Miron Nicolescu were among his students.