Timeline 1826Born on 17 September in Breselenz, in the Kingdom of Hanover, the son of a Lutheran pastor. 1846Enters the University of Göttingen to study theology, but soon moves to mathematics. 1847Goes to study in Berlin, with Dirichlet, Jacobi, Steiner and Eisenstein. 1851Doctorate in Göttingen, supervised by Gauss, with the thesis on complex functions. 1854On 10 June, gives his habilitation lecture on the foundations of geometry. 1857Publishes the theory of abelian functions and becomes an associate professor. 1859Succeeds Dirichlet in the chair at Göttingen and is elected to the Berlin Academy. Publishes the paper on prime numbers. 1862Marries Elise Koch. Falls ill with tuberculosis. 1866Dies on 20 July in Selasca, Italy, aged 39. The pastor’s son Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born on 17 September 1826 in Breselenz, a village in the Kingdom of Hanover, in northern Germany. His father, also named Friedrich Bernhard, was a Lutheran pastor who had fought in the wars against Napoleon. The family was poor, and Bernhard was the second of six children. It was his father who taught him until he was ten.