Poor Lobachevsky! As Tom Lehrer admits in this song, he stole was inspired by Danny Kaye’s performance of “Stanislavsky” and found the closest sounding Russian name available….and Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was the closest….ay!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792-1856)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (Никола́й Ива́нович Лобаче́вский) was a distinguished Russian mathematician who invented one of the first non-Euclidean geometries. For centuries mathematicians had been trying to prove that Euclid’s Fifth Postulate—that through a given point, there exists one and only one line parallel to any given line—independently of the existing postulates. Lobachevsky simply changed the postulate and assumed that you could multiple parallel lines through any given point. This gave rise to a new and strange geometry, now commonly called hyperbolic geometry, which is logically consistent in its entirety, but produces very different results from Euclidean geometry (for example, in hyperbolic geometry, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is always less than 180°, not exactly equal to 180°as it is in Euclid’s geometry.
Here’s the song. I give extra credit to any of my students who can sing it through by memory, especially the part about the “first original research paper.”
LessThan3ley 