Julia, Gaston Maurice

Gaston Maurice Julia, (born February 3, 1893, Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria—died March 19, 1978, Paris, France), one of the two main inventors of iteration theory and the modern theory of fractals.

Julia emerged as a leading expert in the theory of complex number functions in the years before World War I. In 1915 he exhibited great bravery in the face of a German attack in which he lost his nose and was almost blinded. Awarded the Legion of Honour for his valour, Julia had to wear a black strap across his face for the rest of his life.

Released from service, Julia wrote a memoir on the iteration of polynomial functions (functions whose terms are all multiples of the variable raised to a whole number; e.g., 8x⁵ − Square root of√5x² + 7) that won the Grand Prix from the French Academy of Sciences in 1918. Together with a similar memoir by French mathematician Pierre Fatou, this created the foundations of the theory. Julia drew attention to a crucial distinction between points that tend to a limiting position as the iteration proceeds and those that never settle down. The former are now said to belong to the Fatou set of the iteration and the latter to the Julia set of the iteration. Julia showed that, except in the simplest cases, the Julia set is infinite, and he described how it is related to the periodic points of the iteration (those that return to themselves after a certain number of iterations). In some cases, this set is the whole plane together with a point at infinity. In other cases, it is a connected curve or is made up entirely of separated points.

After the war, Julia became a professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris, where he ran a major seminar on mathematics and continued to conduct research in geometry and complex function theory. The study of iterative processes in mathematics continued sporadically after Julia’s work until the 1970s, when the advent of personal computers enabled mathematicians to produce graphic images of these sets. Stunning colour-coded graphs that showed elaborate structural detail at all scales stimulated a considerable renewal of interest in these objects among both mathematicians and the public.