He was born in 1793. His scientific work was unnoticed till, in 1867, Houel, the French mathematician, drew attention to its importance.
Johann Bolyai de Bolyai was born in Klausenburg, a town in Transylvania, December 15th, 1802.
His father, Wolfgang Bolyai, a professor in the Reformed College of Maros Vasarhely, retained the ardour in mathematical studies which had made him a chosen companion of Gauss in their early student days at Göttingen.
He found an eager pupil in Johann. He relates that the boy sprang before him like a devil. As soon as he had enunciated a problem the child would give the solution and command him to go on further. As a thirteen-year-old boy his father sometimes sent him to fill his place when incapacitated from taking his classes. The pupils listened to him with more attention than to his father for they found him clearer to understand.
In a letter to Gauss Wolfgang Bolyai writes:—
“My boy is strongly built. He has learned to recognise many constellations, and the ordinary figures of geometry. He makes apt applications of his notions, drawing for instance the positions of the stars with their constellations. Last winter in the country, seeing Jupiter he asked: ‘How is it that we can see him from here as well as from the town? He must be far off.’ And as to three different places to which he had been he asked me to tell him about them in one word. I did not know what he meant, and then he asked me if one was in a line with the other and all in a row, or if they were in a triangle.
“He enjoys cutting paper figures with a pair of scissors, and without my ever having told him about triangles remarked that a right-angled triangle which he had cut out was half of an oblong. I exercise his body with care, he can dig well in the earth with his little hands. The blossom can fall and no fruit left. When he is fifteen I want to send him to you to be your pupil.”
In Johann’s autobiography he says:—
“My father called my attention to the imperfections and gaps in the theory of parallels. He told me he had gained more satisfactory results than his predecessors, but had obtained no perfect and satisfying conclusion. None of his assumptions had the necessary degree of geometrical certainty, although they sufficed to prove the eleventh axiom and appeared acceptable on first sight.
“He begged of me, anxious not without a reason, to hold myself aloof and to shun all investigation on this subject, if I did not wish to live all my life in vain.”