Normal families: New perspectives

Abstract

This paper surveys some surprising applications of a lemma characterizing normal families of merornorphic functions on plane domains. These include short and efficient proofs of generalizations of (i) the Picard Theorems, (ii) Gol'dberg's Theorem (a meromorphic function on ℂ which is the solution of a first-order algebraic differential equation has finite order), and (iii) the Fatou-Julia Theorem (the Julia set of a rational function of degree d ≥ 2 is the closure of the repelling periodic points). We also discuss Bloch's Principle and provide simple solutions to some problems of Hayman connected with this principle.