"I regard this young geometer Bolyai as a genius of the first order"

                                                                                            - Carl Friedrich Gauss -

Janos Bolyai was born in 1802 in Kolozsvar, which belonged to both Hungary and Austria at that time. Taught at home by his father, Farkas Bolyai, Janos quickly mastered calculus and mechanics. At the age of 16, he enrolled Royal Engineering College in Vienna and then spent 11 years in the army after that. 

While still at the college, Bolyai began to work in non-Euclidean geometry. However, as he discovered that Gauss had studied in this area before, though Gauss never ever published it, he was shocked and his paper was not published until 1832 together with a work of his father. He then later found out that Lobachevsky only wrote a similar work in 1829.

When Bolyai was 31, he left the army because of fever. He died in 1860 and left behind nearly 20000 pages of mathematical manuscript. The Babes-Bolyai University was later named after him.