B. Riemann, Theorie der Abel'schen Functionen, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik **54**, 101–155 (1857). Here is a description of this contribution, by Jeremy Gray: In this 1857 paper Riemann established the existence of complex functions on a surface with no boundary. He supposed the surface was *p*-fold connected which means that it is rendered simply connected by *p* cuts when it forms a *p*-sided p olygon He showed that there are *p* linearly independent everywhere holomorphic functions defined inside the polygon by considering what the Dirichlet functions are everywhere defined holomorphic integrands Then he specified *d* points at which the function may have simple poles again imposing the condition that the functions jump by a constant along the cuts. Now he argued that to create functions with only simple poles and constant jumps one took a sum of *p* linearly independent functions with no poles plus functions of the form $1/z$ at one of the specified points and added a constant term The resulting expression depends linearly on $p + d+1$ constants. The jumps therefore dep end linearly on p d constants and there are p of them function is single valued as required So there will functions when p d p i e d p This result today called the Riemann inequality says there is a linear space of complex functions of dimension h d p and this contains non constant functions as soon as d p or d p