formulated: this would involve functions of two complex variables, having four independent periods (i.e. period vectors). This gave the first glimpse of an abelian variety of dimension 2 (an abelian surface): what would now be called the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve of genus 2. After Abel and Jacobi, some of the most important contributors to the theory of abelian functions were Riemann, Weierstrass, Frobenius, Poincaré and Picard. The subject was very popular at the time, already having a large literature. By the end of the 19th century, mathematicians had begun to use geometric methods in the study of abelian functions. Eventually, in the 1920s, Lefschetz laid the basis for the study of abelian functions in terms of complex tori. He also appears to be the first to use the name "abelian variety". It was André Weil in the 1940s who gave the subject its modern foundations in the language of algebraic geometry. Today, abelian varieties form an important tool in number theory, in dynamical systems (more specifically in the study of Hamiltonian systems), and in algebraic geometry (especially Picard varieties and Albanese varieties). Analytic theory Definition A complex torus of dimension g is a torus of real dimension 2g that carries the structure of a complex manifold. It can always be obtained as the quotient of a g-dimensional complex vector space by a lattice of rank 2g. A complex abelian variety of dimension g is a complex torus of dimension g that is also a projective algebraic variety over the field of complex numbers. By invoking the Kodaira embedding theorem and Chow's theorem one may equivalently define a complex abelian variety of dimension g to be a complex torus of dimension g that admits a positive line bundle. Since they are complex tori, abelian varieties carry the structure of a group. A morphism of abelian varieties is a morphism of the underlying algebraic varieties that preserves the identity element for the group structure. An isogeny is a finite-to-one morphism. When a complex torus carries the structure of an algebraic variety, this structure is necessarily unique. In the case g = 1, the notion of abelian variety is the same as that of elliptic curve, and every complex torus gives rise to such a curve; for g > 1 it has been known since Riemann that the algebraic variety condition imposes extra constraints on a complex torus. Riemann conditions The