On This Day In Space: June 10, 1854: Classic curved space lecture makes history (Image Credit: Space.com)
On June 10, 1854, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann gave his classic lecture on curved space.
Riemann was a 19th century mathematician from Germany. His landmark lecture included a workable definition of how someone might measure the curvature of space.
In the first part of his talk, Riemann asked the question of how we might define an n-dimensional space. This resulted in the definition of Riemann space and laid the foundation for the field of Riemannian geometry.
Next, Riemann discussed the dimension of real space and what geometry one should use to describe it.
The lecture was extremely successful even though Riemann’s ideas were so advanced that only few could truly understand them at the time.
The lecture was published two years after his death in 1866, and is considered one of the most important works in geometry.
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