Copyright © 2011 Paul A. Gunsul. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

If is a meromorphic function in the complex plane, R. Nevanlinna noted that its characteristic function could be used to categorize according to its rate of growth as . Later H. Milloux showed for a transcendental meromorphic function in the plane that for each positive integer , as , possibly outside a set of finite measure where denotes the proximity function of Nevanlinna theory. If is a meromorphic function in the unit disk , analogous results to the previous equation exist when . In this paper, we consider the class of meromorphic functions in for which , , and as . We explore characteristics of the class and some places where functions in the class behave in a significantly different manner than those for which holds. We also explore connections between the class and linear differential equations and values of differential polynomials and give an analogue to Nevanlinna's five-value theorem.