Paul Montel

Who was Paul Montel?

Paul Antoine Aristide Montel was a French mathematician. He was born in Nice, France and died in Paris, France. He researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis.

Montel was a student of Henri Lebesgue and Émile Borel at the Sorbonne. Henri Cartan, Jean Dieudonné and Miron Nicolescu were among his students.

Montel's most important contribution to mathematics was the introduction and systematic development of the notion of normal family. This very influential book also contains the first exposition in the 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.