János Bolyai (December 15, 1802–January 27, 1860) was a Transylvanian (Hungarian) mathematician.

Bolyai was born in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania). By the age of 13, he had mastered calculus and other forms of analytical mechanics, his father Farkas Bolyai giving him instructions.

He studied at the Royal Engineering College in Vienna from 1818 to 1822. Between 1820 and 1823 he prepared a treatise on a complete system of non-Euclidean geometry. Bolyai's work was published in 1832 as an appendix to a mathematics textbook by his father.

Gauss, on reading the Appendix, wrote to a friend saying "I regard this young geometer Bolyai as a genius of the first order". In 1848 Bolyai discovered not only that Lobachevsky had published a similar piece of work in 1829, but also a generalisation of this theory. So as we know, Lobachevsky published his work a few years earlier then Bolyai, but it contained only hyperbolic geometry. Bolyai and Lobachevsky didn't know each other or each other's works.

In addition to his work in geometry, Bolyai developed a rigorous geometric concept of complex numbers as ordered pairs of real numbers. Although he never published more than the 24 pages of the Appendix, he left more than 20,000 pages of manuscript of mathematical work when he died. These are now in the Bolyai-Teleki library in Târgu Mureş, Romania.

He was an accomplished polyglot speaking nine foreign languages including Chinese and Tibetan. The Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca is named after him.

There is a crater on the Moon named after Bolyai János .

External links

1802 births | 1860 deaths | 19th century mathematicians | Hungarian mathematicians | Geometers | Natives of Transylvania | Polyglots

ইয়ানোস বলিয়ই | János Bolyai | János Bolyai | János Bolyai | János Bolyai | یانوش بویویی | János Bolyai | Bolyai János | Jānošs Bojaji | János Bolyai | ボヤイ・ヤーノシュ | János Bolyai | János Bolyai | János Bolyai | János Bolyai