When published in 1929, Ford's book was the first treatise in
English on automorphic functions. By this time the field was
already fifty years old, as marked from the time of
Poincaré's early Acta papers that essentially created the
subject. The work of Koebe and Poincaré on uniformization
appeared in 1907. In the seventy years since its first
publication, Ford's Automorphic Functions has become a classic.
His approach to automorphic functions is primarily through the
theory of analytic functions. He begins with a review of the
theory of groups of linear transformations, especially Fuchsian
groups. He covers the classical elliptic modular functions, as
examples of non-elementary automorphic functions and
Poincaré theta series. Ford includes an extended
discussion of conformal mappings from the point of view of
functions, which prepares the way for his treatment of
uniformization. The final chapter illustrates the connections
between automorphic functions and differential equations with
regular singular points, such as the hypergeometric equation.
This book is the first containing an extensive systematic treatment of the theory of automorphic functions in English. The author has succeeded in presenting this difficult subject in a manner which makes it accessible to those who are familiar with the fundamentals of the theory of functions of a complex variable. ... The first chapter, entitled 'Linear Transformations,' and the second, 'Groups of Linear Transformations,' give an especially clear treatment of topics which are of great importance in later work. --Fred W. Perkins, American Mathematical Monthly
The exposition is remarkably clear and explicit ... a very simple and elegant treatment of groups of linear transformations, their fundamental regions and the functions invariant under the groups ... Professor Ford's work, in the first part of his book, is not mere exposition. The methods which he creates are original, and of permanent scientific value ... The second half of the book gives a detailed account of conformal mapping and uniformization, and considers some of the relations of automorphic functions to differential equations. --Bulletin of the AMS