Mathematician:Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Mathematician

Known as "the Copernicus of geometry", for his development of a non-Euclidean geometry, that is, one which does not use the parallel postulate.

Subject of a song by Tom Lehrer.

Nationality

Russian

History

• Born: 1 December 1792 in Nizhny Novgorod (was Gorky from 1932-1990), Russia
• Died: 24 February 1856 in Kazan, Russia

Theorems and Conjectures

• Gauss-Bolyai-Lobachevsky Space (independently of Carl Friedrich Gauss and János Bolyai)
• Lobachevsky Integral Formula

Results named for Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky can be found here.

Definitions of concepts named for Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky can be found here.

Publications

• 1823: Geometriya (although not published its exact original form till 1909)
• 1829: A concise outline of the foundations of geometry
• 1832: On the most important subjects of education
• 1837: Géométrie imaginaire
• 1840: Geometrische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Parellellinien

Also known as

Full name in Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Лобаче́вский.

His name is variously rendered in Roman script; for example, Eric Temple Bell in his Men of Mathematics writes it as Lobatchewsky.

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive

• 1937: Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics: Chapter $\text{XVI}$
• 1991: David Wells: Curious and Interesting Geometry ... (previous) ... (next): A Chronological List Of Mathematicians
• 1998: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (2nd ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich (1793-1856)
• 2008: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (4th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich (1793-1856)

but note the erroneous birth year

• 2014: Christopher Clapham and James Nicholson: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics (5th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich (1792-1856)