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Pólya's Geometric Picture of Complex Contour Integrals

by Bart Braden

Award: Carl B. Allendoerfer

Year of Award: 1988

Publication Information: Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 60 (1987), pp. 321-327

Summary: The paper, part of an issue dedicated to George Pólya, describes a method of visualizing a complex integral as the flux and flow of a vector field.

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About the Author: Bart Braden studied mathematics and languages at Washington State University, as an undergraduate. After an encounter with abstract 20th Century mathematics in graduate school at Yale and Oregon, which culminated in a doctoral thesis on representations of Lie algebras, he gradually returned to the more concrete parts of classical undergraduate mathematics. He is retired from Northern Kentucky University.

Subject classification(s): Analysis | Complex Analysis | Integral Transforms
Publication Date: 
Wednesday, January 31, 2007