Rolf Herman Nevanlinna (né Neovius; 22 October 1895 – 28 May 1980) was a Finnish mathematician who made significant contributions to complex analysis.

He also attended an orchestra school and had a love of music, which was encouraged by his mother: Margarete was an excellent pianist and Frithiof and Rolf would lie under the piano and listen to her playing.

Through free tickets from the orchestra school they got to know and love the music of the great composers, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt, as well as the early symphonies of Sibelius.

During his time at the University of Helsinki, World War I was underway and Nevanlinna wanted to join the 27th Jäger Battalion, but his parents convinced him to continue with his studies.

[5] In 1919, Nevanlinna presented his thesis, entitled Über beschränkte Funktionen die in gegebenen Punkten vorgeschriebene Werte annehmen ("On limited functions prescribed values at given points"), to Lindelöf, his doctoral advisor.

His brother, Frithiof, had received his doctorate in 1918 but likewise was unable to take up a post at a university, and instead began working as a mathematician for an insurance company.

After his appointment as Docent of Mathematics, he gave up his insurance job but did not resign his position as school teacher until he received a newly created full professorship at the university in 1926.

[3] From 1947 Nevanlinna had a chair in the University of Zurich, which he held on a half-time basis after receiving in 1948 a permanent position as one of the 12 salaried Academicians in the newly created Academy of Finland.

Rolf Nevanlinna's article Zur Theorie der meromorphen Funktionen[6] which contains the Main Theorems was published in 1925 in the journal Acta Mathematica.

"[7] Nevanlinna gave a fuller account of the theory in the monographs Le théoreme de Picard – Borel et la théorie des fonctions méromorphes (1929) and Eindeutige analytische Funktionen (1936).

When the Winter War broke out (1939), Nevanlinna was invited to join the Finnish Army's Ballistics Office to assist in improving artillery firing tables.

These tables had been based on a calculation technique developed by General Vilho Petter Nenonen, but Nevanlinna now came up with a new method which made them considerably faster to compile.

His Finnish textbook on the elements of complex analysis, Funktioteoria (1963), written together with Veikko Paatero, has appeared in German, English and Russian translations.

[11] Although Nevanlinna did not participate actively in politics, he was known to sympathise with the right-wing Patriotic People's Movement and, partly because of his half-German parentage, was also sympathetic towards Nazi Germany; with many mathematics professors fired in the 1930s due to the Nuremberg Laws, mathematicians sympathetic to the Nazi policies were sought as replacements, and Nevanlinna accepted a position as professor at the University of Göttingen in 1936 and 1937.