Some Geometric Aspects of the Work of

Let me begin with a personal reminiscence of Lars Ahlfors. My rst contact with him came when he was my undergraduate advisor at Harvard. It was the advisor's job to review and approve the courses that the student had selected. When I entered his ooce and handed him my study card, he looked it over quickly, said \You seem to know what you are doing," and signed the card. This was the only advice I ever got from him. Knowing myself at the time, this was probably the only kind of advice I was likely to accept, and perhaps Ahlfors sensed that. At any rate, it struck me as a good example of how Ahlfors combined a great deal of insight with a minimum of actual work. Years later, at the conference in honor of his 75th birthday, I reminded him of this story. He then asked me, \What was your name again?" When I told him, he responded, \Well, I guess I was right." Ahlfors' attitude towards Riemannian geometry per se seems to have been somewhat mixed. In lecture notes he wrote on quasiconformal mappings in