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George Friedrich Bernard Riemann

Essay by   •  October 31, 2010  •  440 Words (2 Pages)  •  2,183 Views

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George Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born the second of six children in Breselenz, a village near Dannenberg in the Kingdom of Hanover in what is today Germany, on September 17 1826. From a very young age, Riemann exhibited his exceptional skills, which included fantastic calculation abilities, however was shy and suffered numerous nervous break downs. Riemann went on to became a world redound mathematician. He became famous for his hypothesis, called the Riemann Hypothesis. Still to this day, it remains one of the most famous unsolved problems of all time.

In high school, Riemann studied the Bible intensively, but math was still a heavier influence on his mind. As funny as it sounds, he actually tried to prove mathematically the correctness of the book of Genesis. These mathematic solutions caused his teachers to be amazed by his genius and by his ability to solve extremely complicated mathematical problems. He often topped the teacher's intelligence. In 1847, his father managed to send Riemann to University, allowing him to stop studying theology and start studying mathematics.

He was sent to the University of Gottingen, where he first met fellow mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and attended his lectures on the method of least squares. In 1853, Gauss asked his student to prepare a thesis on the foundations of geometry. Over many months, Riemann developed his theory of higher dimensions. When he finally presented his theory in 1854, the mathematical public received it with much enthusiasm. Riemann had found the correct way to extend into "n" dimensions the differential geometry of surfaces, the same problem for which Gauss had proved his "Theorema Egregium." The basic object that Riemann created is now called the "Riemann curvature tensor". His idea was to introduce numbers to every point in space that would describe how much it was curved. "Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions,

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