Bernhard Riemann

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (German:

[ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈbɛʁnhaʁt ˈʁiːman] ⓘ ;[1][2] 17 Bernhard Riemann
September 1826 – 20 July 1866) was a German
mathematician who made profound contributions to
analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In
the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the
first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann
integral, and his work on Fourier series. His
contributions to complex analysis include most notably
the introduction of Riemann surfaces, breaking new
ground in a natural, geometric treatment of complex
analysis. His 1859 paper on the prime-counting
function, containing the original statement of the
Riemann hypothesis, is regarded as a foundational Riemann c. 1863
paper of analytic number theory. Through his Born Georg Friedrich Bernhard
pioneering contributions to differential geometry, Riemann
Riemann laid the foundations of the mathematics of 17 September 1826
general relativity.[3] He is considered by many to be Breselenz, Kingdom of
one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.[4][5] Hanover (modern-day
Germany)
Died 20 July 1866 (aged 39)
Early years Selasca, Kingdom of Italy

Riemann was born on 17 September 1826 in Alma mater University of Göttingen

Breselenz, a village near Dannenberg in the Kingdom University of Berlin
of Hanover. His father, Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Known for See list
was a poor Lutheran pastor in Breselenz who fought in
Scientific career
the Napoleonic Wars. His mother, Charlotte Ebell, died
in 1846. Riemann was the second of six children. Fields Mathematics · Physics
Riemann exhibited exceptional mathematical talent, Institutions University of Göttingen
such as calculation abilities, from an early age but Thesis Grundlagen für eine
suffered from timidity and a fear of speaking in public. allgemeine Theorie der
Funktionen einer
veränderlichen complexen
Education Größe (http://www.maths.tc
d.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Ri
During 1840, Riemann went to Hanover to live with emann/Grund/Grund.pd
his grandmother and attend lyceum (middle school f) (1851)
years), because such a type of school was not
Doctoral Carl Friedrich Gauss
accessible from his home village. After the death of his
advisor
grandmother in 1842, he transferred to the Johanneum
Lüneburg, a high school in Lüneburg. There, Riemann Other academic Gotthold Eisenstein
studied the Bible intensively, but he was often advisors Moritz A. Stern
distracted by mathematics. His teachers were amazed
Carl W. B. Goldschmidt
by his ability to perform complicated mathematical
operations, in which he often outstripped his Notable Gustav Roch
instructor's knowledge. In 1846, at the age of 19, he students Eduard Selling
started studying philology and Christian theology in Signature
order to become a pastor and help with his family's
finances.

During the spring of 1846, his father, after gathering enough money, sent Riemann to the University of
Göttingen, where he planned to study towards a degree in theology. However, once there, he began
studying mathematics under Carl Friedrich Gauss (specifically his lectures on the method of least
squares). Gauss recommended that Riemann give up his theological work and enter the mathematical
field; after getting his father's approval, Riemann transferred to the University of Berlin in 1847.[6]
During his time of study, Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Jakob Steiner, and
Gotthold Eisenstein were teaching. He stayed in Berlin for two years and returned to Göttingen in 1849.

Academia
Riemann held his first lectures in 1854, which founded the field of Riemannian geometry and thereby set
the stage for Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.[7] In 1857, there was an attempt to promote
Riemann to extraordinary professor status at the University of Göttingen. Although this attempt failed, it
did result in Riemann finally being granted a regular salary. In 1859, following the death of Dirichlet
(who held Gauss's chair at the University of Göttingen), he was promoted to head the mathematics
department at the University of Göttingen. He was also the first to suggest using dimensions higher than
merely three or four in order to describe physical reality.[8][7]

In 1862 he married Elise Koch; they had a daughter.

Protestant family and death in Italy

Riemann fled Göttingen when the armies of Hanover and Prussia clashed there in 1866.[9] He died of
tuberculosis during his third journey to Italy in Selasca (now a hamlet of Verbania on Lake Maggiore),
where he was buried in the cemetery in Biganzolo (Verbania).

Riemann was a dedicated Christian, the son of a Protestant minister, and saw his life as a mathematician
as another way to serve God. During his life, he held closely to his Christian faith and considered it to be
the most important aspect of his life. At the time of his death, he was reciting the Lord's Prayer with his
wife and died before they finished saying the prayer.[10]
Meanwhile, in Göttingen his housekeeper discarded some of the
papers in his office, including much unpublished work. Riemann
refused to publish incomplete work, and some deep insights may
have been lost.[9]

Riemannian geometry
Riemann's published works opened up research areas combining
analysis with geometry. These would subsequently become major
parts of the theories of Riemannian geometry, algebraic geometry,
and complex manifold theory. The theory of Riemann surfaces
was elaborated by Felix Klein and particularly Adolf Hurwitz.
This area of mathematics is part of the foundation of topology and Riemann's tombstone in Biganzolo
is still being applied in novel ways to mathematical physics. in Piedmont, Italy

In 1853, Gauss asked Riemann, his student, to prepare a

Habilitationsschrift on the foundations of geometry. Over many months, Riemann developed his theory
of higher dimensions and delivered his lecture at Göttingen on 10 June 1854, entitled Ueber die
Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.[11][12][13] It was not published until twelve years
later in 1868 by Dedekind, two years after his death. Its early reception appears to have been slow, but it
is now recognized as one of the most important works in geometry.

The subject founded by this work is Riemannian geometry. Riemann found the correct way to extend into
n dimensions the differential geometry of surfaces, which Gauss himself proved in his theorema
egregium. The fundamental objects are called the Riemannian metric and the Riemann curvature tensor.
For the surface (two-dimensional) case, the curvature at each point can be reduced to a number (scalar),
with the surfaces of constant positive or negative curvature being models of the non-Euclidean
geometries.

The Riemann metric is a collection of numbers at every point in space (i.e., a tensor) which allows
measurements of speed in any trajectory, whose integral gives the distance between the trajectory's
endpoints. For example, Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs ten numbers at each
point to describe distances and curvatures on a manifold, no matter how distorted it is.

Complex analysis
In his dissertation, he established a geometric foundation for complex analysis through Riemann surfaces,
through which multi-valued functions like the logarithm (with infinitely many sheets) or the square root
(with two sheets) could become one-to-one functions. Complex functions are harmonic functions (that is,
they satisfy Laplace's equation and thus the Cauchy–Riemann equations) on these surfaces and are
described by the location of their singularities and the topology of the surfaces. The topological "genus"
of the Riemann surfaces is given by , where the surface has leaves coming together
at branch points. For the Riemann surface has parameters (the "moduli").
His contributions to this area are numerous. The famous Riemann mapping theorem says that a simply
connected domain in the complex plane is "biholomorphically equivalent" (i.e. there is a bijection
between them that is holomorphic with a holomorphic inverse) to either or to the interior of the unit
circle. The generalization of the theorem to Riemann surfaces is the famous uniformization theorem,
which was proved in the 19th century by Henri Poincaré and Felix Klein. Here, too, rigorous proofs were
first given after the development of richer mathematical tools (in this case, topology). For the proof of the
existence of functions on Riemann surfaces, he used a minimality condition, which he called the Dirichlet
principle. Karl Weierstrass found a gap in the proof: Riemann had not noticed that his working
assumption (that the minimum existed) might not work; the function space might not be complete, and
therefore the existence of a minimum was not guaranteed. Through the work of David Hilbert in the
Calculus of Variations, the Dirichlet principle was finally established. Otherwise, Weierstrass was very
impressed with Riemann, especially with his theory of abelian functions. When Riemann's work
appeared, Weierstrass withdrew his paper from Crelle's Journal and did not publish it. They had a good
understanding when Riemann visited him in Berlin in 1859. Weierstrass encouraged his student Hermann
Amandus Schwarz to find alternatives to the Dirichlet principle in complex analysis, in which he was
successful. An anecdote from Arnold Sommerfeld[14] shows the difficulties which contemporary
mathematicians had with Riemann's new ideas. In 1870, Weierstrass had taken Riemann's dissertation
with him on a holiday to Rigi and complained that it was hard to understand. The physicist Hermann von
Helmholtz assisted him in the work overnight and returned with the comment that it was "natural" and
"very understandable".

Other highlights include his work on abelian functions and theta functions on Riemann surfaces. Riemann
had been in a competition with Weierstrass since 1857 to solve the Jacobian inverse problems for abelian
integrals, a generalization of elliptic integrals. Riemann used theta functions in several variables and
reduced the problem to the determination of the zeros of these theta functions. Riemann also investigated
period matrices and characterized them through the "Riemannian period relations" (symmetric, real part
negative). By Ferdinand Georg Frobenius and Solomon Lefschetz the validity of this relation is
equivalent with the embedding of (where is the lattice of the period matrix) in a projective
space by means of theta functions. For certain values of , this is the Jacobian variety of the Riemann
surface, an example of an abelian manifold.

Many mathematicians such as Alfred Clebsch furthered Riemann's work on algebraic curves. These
theories depended on the properties of a function defined on Riemann surfaces. For example, the
Riemann–Roch theorem (Roch was a student of Riemann) says something about the number of linearly
independent differentials (with known conditions on the zeros and poles) of a Riemann surface.

According to Detlef Laugwitz,[15] automorphic functions appeared for the first time in an essay about the
Laplace equation on electrically charged cylinders. Riemann however used such functions for conformal
maps (such as mapping topological triangles to the circle) in his 1859 lecture on hypergeometric
functions or in his treatise on minimal surfaces.

Real analysis
In the field of real analysis, he discovered the Riemann integral in his habilitation. Among other things,
he showed that every piecewise continuous function is integrable. Similarly, the Stieltjes integral goes
back to the Göttinger mathematician, and so they are named together the Riemann–Stieltjes integral.
In his habilitation work on Fourier series, where he followed the work of his teacher Dirichlet, he showed
that Riemann-integrable functions are "representable" by Fourier series. Dirichlet has shown this for
continuous, piecewise-differentiable functions (thus with countably many non-differentiable points).
Riemann gave an example of a Fourier series representing a continuous, almost nowhere-differentiable
function, a case not covered by Dirichlet. He also proved the Riemann–Lebesgue lemma: if a function is
representable by a Fourier series, then the Fourier coefficients go to zero for large n.

Riemann's essay was also the starting point for Georg Cantor's work with Fourier series, which was the
impetus for set theory.

He also worked with hypergeometric differential equations in 1857 using complex analytical methods and
presented the solutions through the behaviour of closed paths about singularities (described by the
monodromy matrix). The proof of the existence of such differential equations by previously known
monodromy matrices is one of the Hilbert problems.

Number theory
Riemann made some famous contributions to modern analytic number theory. In a single short paper, the
only one he published on the subject of number theory, he investigated the zeta function that now bears
his name, establishing its importance for understanding the distribution of prime numbers. The Riemann
hypothesis was one of a series of conjectures he made about the function's properties.

In Riemann's work, there are many more interesting developments. He proved the functional equation for
the zeta function (already known to Leonhard Euler), behind which a theta function lies. Through the
summation of this approximation function over the non-trivial zeros on the line with real portion 1/2, he
gave an exact, "explicit formula" for .

Riemann knew of Pafnuty Chebyshev's work on the Prime Number Theorem. He had visited Dirichlet in
1852.

Writings
Riemann's works include:

1851 – Grundlagen für eine allgemeine Theorie der Functionen einer veränderlichen
complexen Grösse, Inaugural dissertation, Göttingen, 1851.
1857 – Theorie der Abelschen Functionen, Journal für die reine und angewandte
Mathematik, Bd. 54. S. 101–155.
1859 – Über die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Größe, in: Monatsberichte
der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, November 1859, S. 671ff. With
Riemann's conjecture. Über die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Grösse.
(Wikisource), Facsimile of the manuscript (http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/rieman
n1859.pdf) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20160303224135/http://www.claymath.or
g/sites/default/files/riemann1859.pdf) 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine with Clay
Mathematics.
1861 – Commentatio mathematica, qua respondere tentatur quaestioni ab Illma Academia
Parisiensi propositae (https://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Riemann/Paris/),
 submitted to the Paris Academy for a prize competition
1867 – Über die Darstellbarkeit einer Function durch eine trigonometrische Reihe, Aus dem
dreizehnten Bande der Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu
Göttingen.
1868 – Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zugrunde liegen. (http://resolver.sub.un
i-goettingen.de/purl?GDZPPN002019213) Abh. Kgl. Ges. Wiss., Göttingen 1868.
Translation EMIS, pdf (http://www.emis.de/classics/Riemann/Geom.pdf) On the hypotheses
which lie at the foundation of geometry, translated by W.K.Clifford, Nature 8 1873 183 –
reprinted in Clifford's Collected Mathematical Papers, London 1882 (MacMillan); New York
1968 (Chelsea) http://www.emis.de/classics/Riemann/. Also in Ewald, William B., ed., 1996
"From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics", 2 vols. Oxford
Uni. Press: 652–61.
1876 – Bernhard Riemann's Gesammelte Mathematische Werke und wissenschaftlicher
Nachlass. herausgegeben von Heinrich Weber unter Mitwirkung von Richard Dedekind,
Leipzig, B. G. Teubner 1876, 2. Auflage 1892, Nachdruck bei Dover 1953 (with contributions
by Max Noether and Wilhelm Wirtinger, Teubner 1902). Later editions The collected Works
of Bernhard Riemann: The Complete German Texts. Eds. Heinrich Weber; Richard
Dedekind; M Noether; Wilhelm Wirtinger; Hans Lewy. Mineola, New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1953, 1981, 2017
1876 – Schwere, Elektrizität und Magnetismus, Hannover: Karl Hattendorff.
1882 – Vorlesungen über Partielle Differentialgleichungen 3. Auflage. Braunschweig 1882.
1901 – Die partiellen Differential-Gleichungen der mathematischen Physik nach Riemann's
Vorlesungen. PDF on Wikimedia Commons. On archive.org: Riemann, Bernhard (1901).
Weber, Heinrich Martin (ed.). "Die partiellen differential-gleichungen der mathematischen
physik nach Riemann's Vorlesungen" (https://archive.org/details/diepartiellendi02webegoo
g). archive.org. Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn. Retrieved 1 June 2022.
2004 – Riemann, Bernhard (2004), Collected papers, Kendrick Press, Heber City, UT,
ISBN 978-0-9740427-2-5, MR 2121437 (https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=
2121437)

See also
List of things named after Bernhard Riemann
Non-Euclidean geometry
On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude, Riemann's 1859 paper introducing
the complex zeta function

References
1. Dudenredaktion; Kleiner, Stefan; Knöbl, Ralf (2015) [First published 1962]. Das
Aussprachewörterbuch (https://books.google.com/books?id=T6vWCgAAQBAJ) [The
Pronunciation Dictionary] (in German) (7th ed.). Berlin: Dudenverlag. pp. 229, 381, 398,
735. ISBN 978-3-411-04067-4.
2. Krech, Eva-Maria; Stock, Eberhard; Hirschfeld, Ursula; Anders, Lutz Christian (2009).
Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch (https://books.google.com/books?id=E-1tr_oVkW4C&q=d
eutsches+ausspracheworterbuch) [German Pronunciation Dictionary] (in German). Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter. pp. 366, 520, 536, 875. ISBN 978-3-11-018202-6.
3. Wendorf, Marcia (2020-09-23). "Bernhard Riemann Laid the Foundations for Einstein's
Theory of Relativity" (https://interestingengineering.com/science/bernhard-riemann-the-mind
-who-laid-the-foundations-for-einsteins-theory-of-relativity). interestingengineering.com.
Retrieved 2023-10-14.
 4. Ji, Papadopoulos & Yamada 2017, p. 614
5. Mccleary, John. Geometry from a Differentiable Viewpoint. Cambridge University Press.
p. 282.
6. Stephen Hawking (4 October 2005). God Created The Integers (https://books.google.com/b
ooks?id=3zdFSOS3f4AC). Running Press. pp. 814–815. ISBN 978-0-7624-1922-7.
7. Wendorf, Marcia (2020-09-23). "Bernhard Riemann Laid the Foundations for Einstein's
Theory of Relativity" (https://interestingengineering.com/science/bernhard-riemann-the-mind
-who-laid-the-foundations-for-einsteins-theory-of-relativity). interestingengineering.com.
Retrieved 2023-04-06.
8. Werke, p. 268, edition of 1876, cited in Pierpont, Non-Euclidean Geometry, A Retrospect (htt
p://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183493815)
9. du Sautoy, Marcus (2003). The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest
Mystery in Mathematics. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-621070-4.
10. "Christian Mathematician – Riemann" (http://godandmath.com/2012/04/24/christian-mathem
aticians-riemann/). 24 April 2012. Retrieved 13 October 2014.
11. Riemann, Bernhard: Ueber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen. In:
Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 13 (1868), S.
133-150. (https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/riemann_hypothesen_1867?p=7)
12. On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry. Bernhard Riemann. Translated by
William Kingdon Clifford [Nature, Vol. VIII. Nos. 183, 184, pp. 14–17, 36, 37.] (http://www.em
is.de/classics/Riemann/WKCGeom.pdf)
13. Riemann, Bernhard; Jost, Jürgen (2016). On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Bases of
Geometry. Classic Texts in the Sciences (1st ed. 2016 ed.). Cham: Springer International
Publishing : Imprint: Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3-319-26042-6.
14. Arnold Sommerfeld, „Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik“, Bd.2 (Mechanik
deformierbarer Medien), Harri Deutsch, S.124. Sommerfeld heard the story from Aachener
Professor of Experimental Physics Adolf Wüllner.
15. Detlef Laugwitz: Bernhard Riemann 1826–1866. Birkhäuser, Basel 1996, ISBN 978-3-7643-
5189-2

Further reading
Derbyshire, John (2003), Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved
Problem in Mathematics, Washington, DC: John Henry Press, ISBN 0-309-08549-7.
Monastyrsky, Michael (1999), Riemann, Topology and Physics, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser,
ISBN 0-8176-3789-3.
Ji, Lizhen; Papadopoulos, Athanese; Yamada, Sumio, eds. (2017). From Riemann to
Differential Geometry and Relativity. Springer. ISBN 9783319600390.

External links
Bernhard Riemann (https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=18232) at the Mathematics
Genealogy Project
The Mathematical Papers of Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pu
b/HistMath/People/Riemann/Papers.html)
Riemann's publications at emis.de (http://www.emis.de/classics/Riemann/)
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Bernhard Riemann" (https://mathshistory.st-andr
ews.ac.uk/Biographies/Riemann.html), MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University
of St Andrews
 Bernhard Riemann – one of the most important mathematicians (https://web.archive.org/we
b/20050903035028/http://www.fh-lueneburg.de/u1/gym03/englpage/chronik/riemann/rieman
n.htm)
Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture (https://web.archive.org/web/20160318034045/http://
www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Riemann/Geom/)
Weisstein, Eric Wolfgang (ed.). "Riemann, Bernhard (1826–1866)" (http://scienceworld.wolfr
am.com/biography/Riemann.html). ScienceWorld.
Richard Dedekind (1892), Transcripted by D. R. Wilkins, Riemanns biography. (https://www.
maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Riemann/Leben/Leben.pdf)

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