Bernhard Riemann
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (September 17, 1826 - June
20, 1866) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to analysis
and differential geometry, some of them paving the way for the later development
of general relativity. His name is connected with the zeta function, the Riemann
integral, the Riemann lemma, Riemannian manifolds and Riemann surfaces.
He
was born in Breselenz, a village in the Kingdom Hanover, near Dannenberg, Germany.
His father Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was Lutheran pastor in Breselenz. Bernhard
was the second of six children.
In 1840 Bernhard went to Hanover to live with
his grandmother and visit the Lyceum. After the death of his grandmother in 1842
he went to the Johanneum in Lüneburg. 1846, at the age of 19, he started studying
Philology and Theology at the University of Göttingen. He attended lectures of
Gauss on the method of least squares. 1847 his father allowed him to stop studying
Theology and start studying Mathematics.
In 1847 he moved to Berlin, where
Jacobi, Dirichlet or Steiner were teaching. He stayed in Berlin for two years
and returned to Göttingen in 1849.
Riemann held his first lectures in 1854,
which not only founded the field of Riemannian geometry but set the stage for
Einstein's General relativity. He was promoted an extraordinary professor at the
University of Göttingen in 1857 and became an ordinary professor in 1859.
In
1862 he married Elise Koch.
He died on his third journey to Italy in Selasca.
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