Nikolai Lobachevsky

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792 to 1856) was a Russian mathematician who published the first account of non-Euclidean geometry to appear in print. Born in Nizhny Novgorod into a poor family, he moved with his mother and brothers to Kazan after his father died, attended the Kazan Gymnasium and entered Kazan University in 1807, where the professor Martin Bartels taught him mathematics. He took a master's degree in 1811, became a lecturer in 1814, an extraordinary professor in 1816 and a full professor in 1822, and from 1827 he was rector of Kazan University for nineteen years, overseeing a large building programme and a strong research culture. In 1826 he asked his department to hear a paper on a new geometry, and in 1837 and 1840 he published Geometrie imaginaire and a German summary of his geometry of parallel lines, which greatly impressed Gauss. In 1834 he also found a method for approximating the roots of algebraic equations. His hyperbolic geometry was accepted only after his death.