Farkas Bolyai - Biography

Biography

Bolyai was born in Bólya (Buia), a village near Hermannstadt, Grand Principality of Transylvania, Habsburg Empire (now Sibiu, Romania). His father was Gáspár Bolyai and his mother Krisztina Vajna. Farkas was taught at home by his father until the age of six years when he was sent to the Calvinist school in Nagyszeben. His teachers recognized his talents in arithmetics and in learning languages. He learned Latin, Greek, Romanian, Hebrew and later also French, Italian and English. With 12 years he left school and was appointed as a tutor to the eight year old son of the count Kemény. This meant that Bolyai was now treated as a member of one of the leading families in the country, and he became not only a tutor but a real friend to the count's son. In 1790 Bolyai and his pupil both entered the Calvinist College in Klausenburg (today Cluj-Napoca) where they spent five years.

The professor of philosophy at the College in Klausenburg tried to turn Bolyai against mathematics and towards religious philosophy. Bolyai, however, decided to go abroad with Simon Kemény on an educational trip in 1796 and began to study mathematics systematically at German universities first in Jena and then in Göttingen. In these times Bolyai became a close friend of Carl Friedrich Gauss.

He returned home to Klausenburg in 1799. It was there he met and married Zsuzsanna Benkő and where their son János Bolyai – later an even more famous mathematician than his father – was born in 1802. Soon thereafter he accepted a teaching position for mathematics and sciences at the Calvinist College in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu-Mureş), where he spent the rest of his life.