EPILOGUE
Bernhard Riemann died on Friday, July 20, 1866, a few weeks short of his 40th birthday. He had caught a heavy cold in the fall of 1862, and this had accelerated the tuberculosis from which he had probably suffered since childhood.138 The efforts of Göttingen colleagues had secured a series of government grants to enable Riemann to travel to a better climate, this being the only way known for a TB sufferer to obtain relief from the disease and slow its progress.
Thus, Riemann’s last four years had been spent almost entirely in Italy. When he died he was staying in Selasca, on the western shore of Lago Maggiore in the Piedmontese Alps. His wife, Elise, and their three-year-old daughter, Ida, were with him. Richard Dedekind recorded the event in the brief biography of his friend that he appended to the Collected Works.
On June 28 he arrived at Lago Maggiore, where he lived at the Villa Pisoni in Selasca, near Intra.139 Swiftly his strength ebbed away, and he himself perceived with full clarity that his end was approaching. Still, on the day before his death, resting in the shade of a fig tree, full of joy at the beautiful scenery laid out before him, he was at
work on those papers that, sad to say, he left unfinished. His end was very peaceful, with no struggle or death-spasm. It seemed as though he watched with interest the separation of the soul from the body. His wife brought bread and wine to him. He asked her to take his greetings to those at home, and said to her: “Kiss our child.” She recited the Lord’s Prayer for him, but he himself could no longer speak. At the words “forgive us our trespasses” he directed his eyes devoutly upward. She felt his hand become colder in hers, and after a few breaths his pure, noble heart ceased beating. That pious sense that was planted in him under his father’s roof, stayed with him all his life, and he served God faithfully, in his own way. With devotion of the highest kind, he never interfered with the faith of others: the main thing in religion was, in his opinion, daily self-examination before the face of God.
He rests in the churchyard of Biganzolo, in the parish of Selasca. His gravestone carries the inscription:
HERE RESTS IN GOD
GEORG FRIEDRICH BERNHARD RIEMANN
PROFESSOR AT GÖTTINGEN
BORN IN BRESELENZ, SEPT. 17, 1826
DIED IN SELASCA, JULY 20, 1866
ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD TO THEM THAT LOVE GOD
The inscription is all in German. The epitaph is from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, 8:28. (In German, Denen die Gott lieben müssen alle Dinge zum Besten dienen.) Riemann’s grave site no longer exists. It was destroyed in a later reorganization of the church property. The inscribed stone survived, though, and has been set in a nearby wall.
Elise Riemann returned to Göttingen with her daughter. They lived there with Bernhard Riemann’s one surviving sister, also named Ida, at Weender Chaussee 17. The next door house, No. 17A, was occupied by Hermann Schwartz, a professor of mathematics at the Uni-
versity.140 Riemann’s chair at the University was taken by Alfred Clebsch, who wrote the founding text of modern algebraic geometry.
In 1884, Riemann’s daughter Ida, then 20 years old, married Carl David Schilling, who had taken his doctor’s degree under Schwartz in 1880 and remained friendly with him. Soon after this, Schilling took up a position as director of the marine academy in Bremen. In September 1890, Riemann’s widow and his sister went to live with the Schillings in Bremen. Riemann’s daughter lived until 1929, her husband until 1932. They seem to have produced a large family, but the precise number of their children has eluded me. The descendants of Bernhard Riemann are, at any rate, now merged into the general mass of humanity.
Few as were the years of work allotted to him, and few as are the printed pages covered by the record of his researches, his name is, and will remain, a household word among mathematicians. Most of his memoirs are masterpieces—full of original methods, profound ideas and far-reaching imagination.
—George Chrystal, from the article headed “Riemann” in the 1911 Encyclopœdia Britannica
