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
his mathematical researches 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.