COMPACT AND NORMAL CONVERGENCE When trying to dene convergence of meromorphic functions, the poles give problems (this

is not unexpected). Since we want the limit function to be meromorphic in a region D, the reasonable thing to ask is that there are only nitely many terms in the sum that have poles in compact subsets of D. This property may be called dispersion of poles. Then everything else just follows in the same way as in the convergence of analytic functions. Definition 0.1. A series fn of functions, each one of which is meromorphic in D, is said to converge compactly if for each compact set K D there is an index m = m(K ) (m a positive integer) such that the following conditions hold (1) For each n m the set of poles of fn is disjoint from K . (2) The series nm fn converges uniformly on K . The series is said to converge normally if instead of the second condition, the stronger condition | fn | <
nm

holds on the set K . In particular, this implies that the union of the pole-sets of all of the functions fn is discrete and relatively closed in D, and that normal convergence implies compact convergence. Also, a compactly convergent series of meromorphic functions has a meromorphic limit function. Part of the point of these denitions is that it enables you to rearrange the terms of a normally convergent series with impunity, and not have any problems with conditional convergence sneaking in the back door. Historically, this is what Euler used to nd the sums (2n) in terms of Bernoulli numbers. This gives us one of the most beautiful formulas in mathematics 1 2 (2) = = . 6 n2 n=1