Bernhard Riemann

Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician whose work reshaped several major areas of mathematics and later provided essential tools for physics. A student of Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Gottingen, Riemann developed the geometric framework now called Riemannian geometry, which describes curved spaces of any number of dimensions and later became the mathematical foundation Albert Einstein relied on to formulate general relativity. He introduced the concept of Riemann surfaces in the study of complex functions, defined the Riemann integral used throughout calculus, and in an 1859 paper proposed the Riemann hypothesis, a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers that remains one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. Riemann's relatively short career, cut short by tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine, nonetheless produced ideas that continued to shape both pure mathematics and theoretical physics for more than a century afterward.