Farkas Bolyai

Farkas Bolyai (9 February 1775 to 20 November 1856), also known as Wolfgang Bolyai in Germany, was a Hungarian mathematician mainly known for his work in geometry. He was born at Bólya, a village near Nagyszeben in the Grand Principality of Transylvania, now Buia in Romania, to Gáspár Bolyai and Krisztina Vajna. His father taught him at home until he was six, when he was sent to the Calvinist school in Nagyszeben, where his teachers recognized his talent for arithmetic and languages. He learned Latin, Greek, Romanian, Hebrew and later French, Italian and English, and he could multiply and divide thirteen or fourteen digit numbers in his head and extract square and cube roots from them. At twelve he left school to tutor the eight-year-old son of Count Kemény.