Bernhard Riemann By: Jacob Jackson

Biography Bernhard Riemann was born in 1826 and died in 1866 at age 30. In his short career, he introduced ideas of fundamental importance in complex analysis, real analysis, differential geometry, number theory, and other subjects. He was born in the Kingdom of Hannover, later part of germany. His family encouraged his interest in history and mathematics at an early age.

Contributions Riemann was an unpaid lecturer at Gottingen in 1856 and he was preparing to lecture the faculty in the hopes of getting a paid position, during his lecture he started to develop a type of geometry that did not deal with points, lines, or shapes in their normal train of thought. He also said “every line through a point not on a given line meets that given line” which means that it is impossible to draw parallel line, that the lines will always intersect at one point later on. This type of geometry he created is now known as Riemann geometry. His work thinking about curved space even influenced Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which without this theory of relativity we would have a completely different view of our world today.