Göttingen, where he became intimate with Gauss, then nineteen years old. Gauss used to say that Bolyai was the only man who fully understood his views on the metaphysics of mathematics. Bolyai became professor at the Reformed College of Maros-Vásárhely, where for forty-seven years he had for his pupils most of the present professors of Transylvania. The first publications of this remarkable genius were dramas and poetry. Clad in old-time planter's garb, he was truly original in his private life as well as in his mode of thinking. He was extremely modest. No monument, said he, should stand over his grave, only an apple-tree, in memory of the three apples; the two of Eve and Paris, which made hell out of earth, and that of Newton, which elevated the earth again into the circle of heavenly bodies.[64] His son, Johann Bolyai (1802–1860), was educated for the army, and distinguished himself as a profound mathematician, an impassioned violin-player, and an expert fencer. He once accepted the challenge of thirteen officers on condition that after each duel he might play a piece on his violin, and he vanquished them all.
The chief mathematical work of Wolfgang Bolyai appeared in two volumes, 1832–1833, entitled Tentamen juventutem studiosam in elementa matheseos puræ…introducendi. It is followed by an appendix composed by his son Johann on The Science Absolute of Space. Its twenty-six pages make the name of Johann Bolyai immortal. He published nothing else, but he left behind one thousand pages of manuscript which have never been read by a competent mathematician! His father seems to have been the only person in Hungary who really appreciated the merits of his son's work. For thirty-five years this appendix, as also Lobatchewsky's researches, remained in almost entire oblivion. Finally Richard Baltzer of the University of Giessen, in 1867, called attention to the wonderful researches. Johann Bolyai's Science Absolute of
