Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (help·info) (
German pronunciation: [ˈriːman];
September 17, 1826 –
July 20, 1866) was an influential
German mathematician who made contributions to
analysis and
differential geometry, some of them enabling the later development of
general relativity.
Early life
Riemann was born in Breselenz, a village near Dannenberg in the Kingdom of Hanover in what is Germany today. His father, Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, was a poor Lutheranian pastor in Breselenz who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. His mother died before her children had reached adulthood. Riemann was the second of six children, shy, and suffered from numerous nervous breakdowns. Riemann exhibited exceptional mathematical skills, such as fantastic calculation abilities, from an early age, but suffered from timidity and a fear of speaking in public.
Middle life
In high school, Riemann studied the Bible intensively, but he was often distracted by mathematics. To this end, he even tried to prove mathematically the correctness of the Book of Genesis. His teachers were amazed by his adept ability to solve complicated mathematical operations, in which he often outstripped his instructor's knowledge. During 1840, Riemann went to Hanover to live with his grandmother and attend lyceum (middle school). After the death of his grandmother in 1842, he attended high school at the Johanneum Lüneburg. In 1846, at the age of 19, he started studying philology and theology in order to become a priest and help with his family's finances.
During the spring of 1846, his father (Friedrich Riemann), after gathering enough money to send Riemann to university, allowed him to stop studying theology and start studying mathematics. He was sent to the renowned University of Göttingen, where he first met Carl Friedrich Gauss, and attended his lectures on the method of least squares.
In 1847, Riemann moved to Berlin, where Jacobi, Dirichlet, Steiner, and Eisenstein were teaching. He stayed in Berlin for two years and returned to Göttingen in 1849.
Later life
Bernhard Riemann held his first lectures in 1854, which founded the field of Riemannian geometry and thereby set the stage for Einstein's general theory of relativity. In 1857, there was an attempt to promote Riemann to extraordinary professor status at the University of Göttingen. Although this attempt failed, it did result in Riemann finally being granted a regular salary. In 1859, following Dirichlet's death, he was promoted to head the mathematics department at Göttingen. He was also the first to suggest using dimensions higher than merely three or four in order to describe physical reality[citation needed]—an idea that was ultimately vindicated with Einstein's contribution in the early 20th century. In 1862 he married Elise Koch and had a daughter.
Riemann fled Göttingen when the armies of Hanover and Prussia clashed there in 1866.[1] He died of tuberculosis during his third journey to Italy in Selasca (now a hamlet of Verbania on Lake Maggiore) where he was buried in the cemetery in Biganzolo (Verbania). Meanwhile, in Göttingen his housekeeper tidied up some of the mess in his office, including much unpublished work. Riemann refused to publish incomplete work and some deep insights may have been lost forever.[1]
Vahid Damanafshan,
Reference: Wikipedia
