596 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 931 



bungled. The name of the proud young Mag- 

 yar, Bolyai Janos, Bonola correctly translates 

 into Italian as Giovanni Bolyai, John Bolyai. 

 Carslaw seems to think him an Austrian, and 

 always calls him Johann (16 times or more). 

 He might as well have called him Ivan. The 

 young Hungarian had the racial hatred for 

 Austrians. In garrison, 13 of them, cavalry 

 officers, challenged him at once with the saber. 

 He accepted, only stipulating that between 

 each two duels he might play a piece on his 

 violin. He was victor over all. 



His father, Bolyai Farkas, could at need 

 deal more tactfully with the common enemy. 

 When an. Austrian Schulrath was sent with 

 hostile intent to inspect the protestant college 

 at Maros-Vasarhely, a nest of Magyar rebels, 

 old Bolyai ITarkas received him with exceed- 

 ing geniality, related with zest and fire the ex- 

 periences of his student life in Germany, and 

 took him to dinner. They ate, drank and 

 talked like two German students. " The in- 

 terests of the college required it, and they said 

 ' Du ' to one another." And that the Schul- 

 rath should see near him no rebel faces, 

 Farkas bade his son sacrifice his beautiful 

 beard. Bolyai won. The Austrian was kept 

 away from the college. 



Franz Schmidt told me in Budapest his 

 father had seen Bolyai Janos in Temesvar in 

 mere wantonness of the pride of life cut off 

 with his beautiful Damascus blade an iron 

 spike driven into his doorpost. And now 

 Carslaw in English calls him Johann ! 



No better fares it with Lobachevski. 

 Bonola gives his name in Italian as Nicola 

 Ivanovic Lobacefski, in which the very same 

 Russian letter B is twice transliterated v and 

 then f. Carslaw makes the worse blunder of 

 twice transliterating it v and then w. But 

 another single Russian letter, equivalent to 

 the Italian c, our ch as in church, Carslaw 

 transliterates as four letters together, and so 

 in translating the name, Carslaw gives it 

 seven additional letters, and besides all that, 

 a substitute letter w which wholly destroys 

 the sound, since Carslaw's tschew can have 

 in English only the sound made ofi^ensive by 

 Fletcher. 



The fault of the seriously unsatisfactory 

 and misleading exposition of Lobachevski's 

 transition work of 1826 is Bonola's. Bonola 

 pretends to know all about the contents of 

 this memoir, never printed and of which no 

 manuscript has ever been found, while really 

 oblivious to the never explained paradox of 

 its very name: Exposition succincte des 

 principes de la geometrie, avec une demon- 

 stration rigoureuse du theoreme des paralleles.. 

 What a horribly unfortunate title for a man 

 who three years later began to publish work 

 which shows such " demonstration rigoureuse " 

 eternally impossible ! He never confesses 

 what it was. 



And again when he gradually became con- 

 scious of " the possibility of the existence of 

 geometry in a wider sense than that in which 

 Euclid first expounded it to us," that which 

 young John Bolyai, with his magnificent 

 nerve, in 1829 called " The Science Absolute 

 of Space," Lobachevski in 1835 called " Imag- 

 inary Geometry." In 1855, going blind and 

 dying, he gives it at last a more worthy name, 

 Pangeometry, but dies without its having ob- 

 tained the slightest public recognition and 

 without having made a single disciple. Noth- 

 ing could be more false than Carslaw's sen- 

 tence, p. 86 : 



Non-Euclidean Geometry, just as it was con- 

 ceived by Schweikart in 1816, became in 1829-30 

 a recognized part of the general scientific inherit- 

 ance. 



In fact for more than a third of a century 

 thereafter, it was as if it had never been born. 



A voluminous work by the academician 

 Buniakovski appeared in St. Petersburg in 

 1853 in which Lobachevski is not even men- 

 tioned, and in all his published works Gauss 

 never even once mentioned the name of Lo- 

 bachevski or of John Bolyai. Tet the two 

 dozen pages of John Bolyai was something 

 incalculably tremendous. Is then the silence of 

 Gauss to be attributed to meanness or blind- 

 ness? He said he "feared the outcry of the 

 Boeotians," if he should speak. Max Simon 

 says, 1901, 



