Mathemetician Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky is known for
founding the field of non-Euclidean geometry. This field involves the formation
of lines and shapes in curved space, as opposed to Euclidean geometry, which
deals exclusively with figures on flat planes. He was born in Novgorod, Russia,
in 1792, and died in 1856. He studied at Kazan State University under German
professors and received a master’s degree from the school, and stayed on as a
professor of mathematics. When the Kazan region instituted xenophobic policies
and the German faculty left the school, Lobachevsky was promoted and conducted
his mathematical research at the school.
He called his studies “imaginary geometry”, and his research
into curved geometry is considered some of the most important in mathematics. However,
when he was elected as an honorary member of Moscow State University’s faculty,
he found only scorn for his ideas from his colleagues there. It was not until
the late 1860s that his work was fully appreciated.
Credit to britannica.com
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