It was a truly milestone event in the history of geometry, although at first it didn't look like this at all. Twenty-eight-year-old Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann applied for a position at the University of Göttingen, and thus presented a report On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry to the Academic Council. The audience did not understand anything, and Riemann was not given a position. And only the very old Gauss left the lecture deep in thought. Later it turned out that the lecture was historic, and that was the beginning of Riemannian geometry. A half-century later, Riemann's ideas were embodied in Einstein's general theory of relativity. It turns out that Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century, was far ahead of his time – simply put, he was riding before the hounds.
