János Bolyai

(1802 - 1860)

Born in what was then part of the Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, János Bolyai was the son of a renowned mathematician. By the age of thirteen the younger Bolyai had begun to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming skilled at both calculus and analytic mechanics. He spent much of his life attempting to prove Euclid’s parallel axiom and, later, worked on theories of non-Euclidian geometry.