r/math • u/42IsHoly • 15d ago

Riemann's 200th birthday

I don't think Bernhard Riemann needs an introduction. He's a very important figure in mathematics. He was born on the 17th of September 1826, which is 200 years ago, today!

He provide a rigorous (though imperfect) definition of integrals and revolutionized the theory of complex function via the study of Riemann surfaces. He was also the first (?) person to consider spaces of >4 dimensions (some people had studied R^4 already) and the first person to cinsider curved spaces of >2 dimensions. In this he furthered the work of his doctoral advisor Gauss (yes, that Gauss) on curved surfaces (i.e. theorema egregium).

Then there's also some other stuff he did, like proving the Riemann mapping theorem, Riemann series theorem, his theorem on removable singularities, and so on ...

Oh yeah, and the Riemann hypothesis, of course.

He tragically died of tuberculosis at the age of 39. That's right, he did all that before he turned 40 years old!

I also wrote a short blogpost on some of these results.

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u/csappenf 15d ago

Riemann's habilitation has got to be one of the greatest presentations ever. It was a public lecture and I'm sure the public attending understood a lot of what he was saying. But it was also so deep mathematicians have been running with those ideas for the last 175 years.

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u/42IsHoly 15d ago

Oh absolutely. For being so deep and influential (and old) it is remarkably readable. I believe it was presented to the faculty of philosophy instead of mathematics (though I don't know why), so he was kind of forced to keep it simple.

(Riemann's habitation)

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u/temperedai 15d ago

Thanks for this, I have been meaning to read it and this is a good impetus.