Mathmetition Gaston Maurice Julia was born on February 3, 1893 in Sidi
Bel Abbes, Algeria. As a soldier in World War I, Julia was wounded in
an attack on the French front designed to celebrate the Kaiser's birthday.
Julia lost his nose in the battle, and had to wear a leather strap across his
face for the rest of his life. Between several painful operations, he carried
on the majority of his mathematical research in hospitals. At the young
age of 25, Julia published a 199 page masterpiece "Memoire sur l'iteration
des fonctions". This paper dealt with the iteration of a rational function, F.
Julia gave a precise description of the set J(f) of those z in C for which the
nth iterate f(z) stays bounded as n tends to infinity. His paper received the
Grand Prix de'l Academie des Sciences.
Seminars were organized in Berlin in 1925 to study his work and participants
included Brauer, Hopf, and Reidemeister, prominent mathematicians in the
1920's. H. Cremer produced an essay on his work which included the first
visualization of a Julia set.
Although Julia was famous in the 1920's, his work was essentially forgotten
until Benoit Mandelbrot brought it back to fame in the 1970's through his
computer experiments.
You can download images of the Julia Set in our download library.