Early Life and Career
Hansteen was born in Christiania as the son of Johannes Mathias Hansteen (1744–1792) and his wife Anne Cathrine Treschow (1754–1829). He was the younger brother of writer Conradine Birgitte Dunker, and through her the uncle of Bernhard Dunker and Vilhelmine Ullmann, and granduncle of Mathilde Schjøtt, Ragna Nielsen and Viggo Ullmann. His mother was a first cousin of Niels Treschow.
The intention was for Hansteen to become a naval officer, but since his father died when Hansteen was young, this plan did not materialize. Instead, he attended Oslo Cathedral School from the age of nine. Niels Treschow was the principal of this school. Hansteen took the examen artium in 1802, and in 1803 he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he originally studied law. He later took more interest in mathematics, estranged by the lack of universal validity of a country's laws compared to the mathematical laws. He had also been inspired by the lectures of Hans Christian Ørsted. He was hired as the tutor of a young noble, Niels Rosenkrantz von Holstein, who lived at Sorø. Here, he also met his future wife Johanne Cathrine Andrea Borch, a daughter of professor Caspar Abraham Borch. In 1806 he was hired as a mathematics teacher in the gymnasium of Frederiksborg.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Hansteen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“It were sad to gaze on the blessèd and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)