Nikolai Lobachevsky

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (Никола́й Ива́нович Лобаче́вский; – ) was a Russian mathematician and geometer, known primarily for his work on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry, and also for his fundamental study on Dirichlet integrals, known as the Lobachevsky integral formula. William Kingdon Clifford called Lobachevsky the "Copernicus of Geometry" due to the revolutionary character of his work. Nikolai Lobachevsky was born either in or near the city of Nizhny Novgorod in the Russian Empire (now in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia) in 1792 to parents of Russian and Polish origin – Ivan Maksimovich Lobachevsky and Praskovia Alexandrovna Lobachevskaya. He was one of three children. When he was seven, his father, a clerk in a land-surveying office, died, and Nikolai moved with his mother to Kazan. Nikolai Lobachevsky attended Kazan Gymnasium from 1802, graduating in 1807, and then received a scholarship to Kazan University, which had been founded just three years earlier in 1804. At Kazan University, Lobachevsky was influenced by professor Johann Christian Martin Bartels, a former teacher and friend of the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Lobachevsky received a Master of Science in physics and mathematics in 1811. In 1814 he became a lecturer at Kazan University, in 1816 he was promoted to associate professor. In 1822, at the age of 30, he became a full professor, teaching mathematics, physics, and astronomy. He served in many administrative positions and became the rector of Kazan University in 1827. In 1832, he married Varvara Alexeyevna Moiseyeva. They had a large number of children (eighteen according to his son's memoirs, though only seven apparently survived into adulthood). He was dismissed from the university in 1846, ostensibly due to his deteriorating health: by the early 1850s, he was nearly blind and unable to walk. He died in poverty in 1856 and was buried in Arskoe Cemetery, Kazan. In 1811, in his student days, Lobachevsky was accused by a vengeful supervisor of atheism (признаки безбожия ).