J Nos Bolyai The Mathmatician Essay, Research Paper

J nos Bolyai

Back in 19th century, two extremely intelligent mathematicians, the Hungarian J nos Bolyai and the Russian Nicolai Lobechevsky, showed that one could throw out Euclid s parallel postulate and come up with a weird yet consistent form of geometry. J nos Bolyai was a great man that helped further the exploration of geometry and math. J nos was born on December 15, 1802 in Kolozsv r, Hungary. This place is now referred to as Cluj, Romania. His father was known as Farkas Bolyai. J nos was considered a genius in many ways. For example, by the age of 13 he had mastered calculus and other forms of analytical mechanics. He also became a renowned violinist that performed in Vienna. He studied at the Royal Engineering College in Vienna for four years. After that, he joined the army engineering corps, in which he spent 11 years. Soon after, he finished his studies at the Royal Engineering College, J nos was the best swordsman and dancer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. These accomplishments made J nos a well known success.

J nos was not only a genius but he was a perfectionist as well. He never smoked or drank. That included alcohol or coffee. He was also fluent in nine foreign languages that included Chinese and Tibetan. His main accomplishment was that he prepared a treatise on a complete system of non-Euclidean geometry. In addition to his work in geometry, Bolyai made a geometric concept of complex numbers as ordered pairs of real numbers. J nos called his geometry imaginary in order to distinguish it from the usual Euclidean geometry. These new types of geometry were unheard of. They were just too bizarre for people do understand and people just didn t accept them. Before his work was published though, Bolyai discovered that another mathematician, named Karl Friedrich Gauss, had already figured out much of his work. This was a severe blow to him and it stuttered his reaction for publishing. Bolyai s father, however, went ahead and published J nos s work in 1832 as an Appendix to an essay. Gauss read the essay and wrote to a friend I regard this young geometer, Bolyai, as a genius of the first order. He then wrote to Bolyai s father saying, To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

In 1848, Bolyai discovered that Lobachevsky had published a similar piece of work in 1829. Bolyai came down with a fever that frequently disabled him an in 1833 he was pensioned off from his army career. Although he never published more than 24 pages of the Appendix he left more than 20,000 pages of manuscript of mathematical work when he died. They are now in the Bolyai-Teleki library in Tirgu-Mures. In 1945, a university in Cluj was named after him; the Romanian authorities later removed the name.

J nos Bolyai died on January 27, 1860 in Marosv r rhely, Hungary. This place is now known as Tirgu-Mures, Romania. J nos Bolyai was and still is a great asset to non-Euclidean geometry. This Hungarian mathematician was born and died in Hungary and the memory of him and his work will live on forever. He helped people see that there are many ways of doing things and not everything is as flat as a piece of paper.