Janos Bolyai Non-Euclidean Geometry

1832 to 1833

In 1833 Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai published "Appendix scientiam spatii

absolute veram exhibens: a veritate aut falsitate axiomatis xi Euclidei (a priori haud
unquam decidenda) independentem. . . ." appended to a textbook by his mathematician
father Farkas Bolyai , entitled Tentamen juventutem studiosam in elementa matheseos
purae I pp. (second series). The two volumes appeared in Maros Vasarhelyini Hungary
(now Romania) printed by Joseph and Simon Kali, at the press of the Reform College.

Although the idea of a non-Euclidean geometry had occurred independently to several

nineteenth-century mathematicians, János Bolyai was one of the first to publish an
organized, deductive and logically based system that was avowedly non-Euclidean. He
was preceded only by Lobachevskii (Lobachevsky), whose "O nachalakh geometrii" (On
the Foundations of Geometry) had been published in the obscure periodical, Kazanskii
vestnik, izdavaemyi pri Imperatorskom Kazamskom Universitete in Kazan, Russia, in
1829-30, but Bolyai remained unaware of the Russian's work until 1848, when he came
across the German translation Lobachevskii's Geometrische Untersuchungen (1840).
Bolyai and Lobachevskii are generally given equal credit for the invention of non-
Euclidean geometry.

János Bolyai began developing his new geometry in 1820, and completed it five years
later. He undertook this task despite the warnings of his father, who discouraged his son
in the strongest terms from trying to prove or refute Euclid's parallel axiom; in a letter
written in 1820, Farkas told his son not to "tempt the parallels" and to "shy away from it
as from lewd intercourse, it can deprive you of all your leisure, your health, your peace of
mind and your entire happiness." The elder Bolyai found his son's new geometry of
"absolute space" unacceptable, but finally, in the summer of 1831, decided to send
János's manuscript to his old friend Carl Friedrich Gauss . Neither of the Bolyais knew
that Gauss had been working for thirty years on developing his own non-Euclidean
geometry, so János was dreadfully shocked to read in Gauss's reply that he [Gauss]
could not praise János's system since to do so would be to praise himself! Despite this
blow, János agreed to let his paper be published as an appendix to his father's obscure
mathematics textbook printed in a small edition by an equally obscure Hungarian school
publisher.

Unsurprisingly, Bolyai's paper failed to attract the attention of contemporary

mathematicians, and his new geometry remained almost completely unknown until 1867,
when German mathematician Heinrich Richard Baltzer publicized the achievements of
Bolyai and Lobachevskii in his Elemente der Mathematik.