Bernhard Riemann

Photo Credit- http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/PictDisplay/Riemann.html

   Bernhard Riemann was the second of six kids, two boys and four girls, born to Friedrich and Charlotte. Their father was their teacher for the first few years of their lives will Bernhard turned ten when a local school teacher took over for their father. 

   in 1840 Bernhard went to Lyceum in Hannover where he was a good student but not exceptional in anyway, he did show interest in mathematics and was allowed to focus more directly on it at school. In 1846 Riemann enrolled in university of Gottingen and studied theology because his father had wanted him to but that didn't stop him from attending mathematics lectures. He did this till he could convince his father into letting him switch to mathematics. He was finally able to and he studied under Moritz Stern and Gauss. 

   This would have been an amazing place to study under Gauss but he was only teaching elementary courses and Riemann still only looked like a good student. The teacher to notice Riemann's potential was Stern which made him move to Berlin university in 1847 to study under Steiner, Jacobi,Dirichlet, and Eisenstein. 

   Moving back to his original University Riemann got his PhD under the supervision of Gauss.He then went on to write his Doctoral thesis which was looked at and accepted bu Gauss in 1851. 

   Gauss recommended Riemann to be appointed to become a lecture at his own home University. In these lectures Riemann have two parts:First he posed the problem of how to define an n-dimensional space and ended up giving a definition of what today we call Riemannian space. In his second part of his lectures he posed deep questions about the relationship of geometry to the world we live in. 

   Once Gauss left Riemann fought for his chair at that University and wasn't given is but two years later he was appointed to professor and in the same year 1857 he had another punished paper. It wasn't till 1859 that Riemann was given the chair of mathematics at Gottingen.

   In 1858 Riemann was visited by Betti, Casorati, and Brischi and they discussed his idea of topology. Later he reported his greatest masterpiece "On the number of primes less then a given magnitude."

   To a more personal side of Riemann in 1862 he married Elise Koch and they had one daughter. In that same year he got tuberculosis. He then traveled to warmer climates to try and get better because in his family everyone died young. He passed away in 1866 while in Selasca, Italy.  After his death  his work published into a book focusing on geometric approach in math.