Bernhard Riemann

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (Breselenz, 17 September 1826 – Selasca, 20 July 1866) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to differential geometry, the theory of functions, and number theory.

Biography

Riemann was born into a Lutheran pastor's family in the Kingdom of Hanover. Already as a schoolboy he read advanced mathematical books, including Adrien-Marie Legendre's Number Theory (1830). He studied mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1846–47 and at the University of Berlin in 1847–49. In 1849 he returned to Göttingen where he started his PhD work on function theory. In 1851 he received his degree and became assistant to the mathematical physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber and finished his "Habilitation" (advanced Doctor's degree) in 1854. In 1857 he received an appointment as "Professor Extraordinarius" (kind of associate professorship, financially supported mainly by students following the lectures of the professor) and at the age of thirty three he became a full professor in Göttingen. His predecessor on the chair of Carl Friedrich Gauss was Peter Gustav Dirichlet, who had died. In 1862 Riemann married Elise Koch and had a daughter named Ida, who was born in Pisa (1863). Shortly after the marriage he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. Repeated trips to Italy failed to stem the progress of the disease, and he died thirty nine years old in Italy in Selasca (now a hamlet of Verbania on Lake Maggiore).

Works

Notwithstanding his short life, Riemann is one of history's prominent mathematicical geniuses with great influence lasting to the present day. In 1854 Riemann presented his Habilitationsschrift in Göttingen; the elderly Gauss was an examiner and was greatly impressed. Riemann argued that the fundamental ingredients for (differential) geometry are a set of points (called today a manifold) and a way of measuring distances along curves in the space. He argued that the space need not be a Euclidean space and that it could have any finite dimension. Riemann's work on differential geometry was carried on by the Italian school of mathematicians, such as Beltrami, Ricci, Bianchi, and Levi-Civita, culminating into the branch of mathematics that physicists call tensor analysis. This is the part of mathematics that formed Albert Einstein's toolbox when he formulated the theory General Relativity. So, one could say that Riemann's Habilitationschrift laid the first foundation for the theory of general relativity.

A few decades before Riemann, Augustin-Louis Cauchy in France had developed complex function theory. Riemann's mentor Gauss had done much work on number theory and in 1859 Riemann combined the two theories by introducing complex function theory into number theory. He took the zeta function, which had been shown previously to have a close connection to the prime numbers, and showed how to define it as a complex-valued function of a complex argument

$\zeta (z)\equiv \sum _{n=1}^{\infty }{\frac {1}{n^{z}}},\qquad z\in \mathbb {C} ,\quad z\neq 1.$

The Riemann zeta function has zeros for all negative even numbers and for infinitely many complex numbers z with $0\leq \Re (z)\leq 1$. Riemann conjectured that the latter zeros all have $\Re (z)={\tfrac {1}{2}}$, i.e, lie on a line (the critical line) parallel to the imaginary axis. This is the content of Riemann's hypothesis. Methods of complex function theory give much information about the distribution of prime numbers, provided it can be shown that all the non-negative zeros lie on this line. All these zeros discovered thus far have been on the critical line. The Riemann hypothesis was one of the 23 problems that David Hilbert challenged mathematicians to solve in his famous 1900 address, The Problems of Mathematics; the challenge has not been met thus far.