Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

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THE FOURTH DIMENSION
closely connected with his name, but a study of his
writings shows that he was a man capable of carrying
on mathematics in its main lines of advance, and of a
judgement equal to discerning what those lines were.
Appointed rector of his University, he died at an
advanced age, surrounded by friends, honoured, with the
results of his beneficent activity all around him. To him
no subject came amiss, from the foundations of geometry,
to the improvement of the stoves by which the peasants
warmed their homes.
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 18th, 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