Prime Obsession Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003) / Chapter Skim
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2. The Soil, the Crop
2. The Soil, the Crop
Pages 19-31
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From page 19... ...
He left no record of his inner life, other than what can be deduced from his letters. His friend and contemporary, Richard Dedekind, was the only person close to him who wrote a detailed memoir; but that was a mere 17 pages and revealed little.
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From page 20... ...
When it all ended at last, with a peace treaty worked out at the Congress of Vienna (Tune 8, 1815) , Europe settled into a long period, almost a century, of relative peace.
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From page 21... ...
The reason for this was that, for complicated dynastic reasons, he was also king of England. The first four of what English people call the "Hanoverian kings" were all name(1 George, an(1 the fourth was on the throne in 1826, when the central character in the story of the Riemann Hypothesis first appeared.
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From page 22... ...
The name "Breselenz" itself derives from the Slavic word for "birch-tree." Slavic dialects and folklore survived into modern times the philosopher Leibnitz (16461716) promoted research into them but from the late Middle Ages onward German immigrants moved into WendIand and by Riemann's time the population was pretty solidly German.
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From page 23... ...
Quickborn is still, today, a sleepy village of timberframed houses and mostly unpaved streets bordered by massive, ancient oak trees. This place, even smaller than Breselenz, remained the family home until the elder Riemann died in 1855.
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From page 24... ...
Von Humboldt (whose brother Alexander was a great explorer and natural scientist) was a classicist and an ivory-tower man, who once said, "Al/l/es Neue eked mich an." "All that is new disgusts me." Yet oddly, the reforms brought in by this stern reactionary eventually made the educational systems of the German states the most aca(lemically a(lvance(1 in Europe.
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From page 25... ...
The location was determined by the fact of his maternal grandmother's living in Hanover so that Riemann's family was spared boarding fees. Before attending this gymnasium Riemann was educated by his father with some assistance from a village schoolteacher named Schultz.
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From page 26... ...
King William IV of England and Hanover died in 1837 without legitimate issue and the English throne passed to his niece, Victoria. Hanover, however, subscribed to the Salic Law of the medieval Franks, according to which only a male could succeed to the throne.
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From page 27... ...
Still his presence must have impressed Riemann, who had already been bitten by the math bug. We know that Riemann attended Gauss's lectures on linear algebra and those of Moritz Stern on the theory of equations.
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From page 28... ...
(Riemann was Lutheran.) His opinion was that the essence of religion is, to translate literally from De(lekin(l's German, "Daily selfexamination before the face of God." · He thought (leeply about philosophy and saw all his mathematical work in a larger philosophical context.
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From page 29... ...
Even the mighty Gauss was teaching mainly elementary courses at Gottingen University in 1846-1847. In search of a meatier
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From page 30... ...
The university students formed a loyal guards corps to protect the king and Riemann serve(1 a spell of guard duty with this corps from 9:00 one morning until 1:00 the following afternoon, a grand total of 28 hours. After returning to Gottingen in 1849, Riemann began work for his doctorate, which he attained two years later, at age 25, having submitted a dissertation on complex function theory.
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From page 31... ...
The job title was Privatdozent "private lecturer.") The year 1857 was also what we should call, in the language of current celebrity biography,Riemann's"breakoutyear."His 1851 doctoral dissertation is nowadays regarded as a classic of nineteenthcentury mathematics, but it drew little attention at the time in spite of having been enthused over by Gauss.
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