Rolf Nevanlinna's most important mathematical achievement is the "value distribution theory" of meromorphic functions. The roots of the theory go back to the result of Émile Picard in 1879, showing that a non-constant complex-valued function which is analytic in the entire complex plane assumes all complex values save at most one. In the early 1920s Rolf Nevanlinna, partly in collaboration with his brother Frithiof, extended the theory to cover meromorphic functions, i.e. functions analytic in the plane except for isolated points in which the Laurent series of the function has a finite number of terms with a negative power of the variable. Nevanlinna's value distribution theory or Nevanlinna theory is crystallised in its two "Main Theorems". Qualitatively, the first one states that if a value is assumed less frequently than average, then the function comes close to that value more often than average. The Second Main Theorem, more difficult than the first one, states roughly that there are relatively few values which the function assumes less often than average.