Marosvásárhely is the city of the Bolyais; this is where the two outstanding mathematicians, Farkas and János Bolyai spent most of their lives. Their relics and works are exhibited in the Bolyai Memorial Museum founded in 1937, in a room of the Protestant College Library. In 1955, the museum and the college library, home to 20,000 pages of manuscripts by the two Bolyais, were moved to the building of the Teleki Library. At the beginning, the Bolyai Memorial Museum belonged to the Protestant College Library (i.e. the Bolyai Library), which later merged with the Teleki Library and is today the Teleki-Bolyai Library. The museum has always been managed by the librarians. Bolyai... Farkas (1775-1856) was born in the village of Bólya, Szeben County on 9 February, 1775. The family belonged to the nobility, but by the time Farkas was born they were no longer wealthy. He started his schools at the Nagyenyed Protestant College. He was considered a prodigy due to his talent in mathematics and languages. Later he transferred to the Kolozsvár Protestant College. He developed a passion for mathematics at the University of Göttingen. This is where he became a life-long friend of the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. When he returned home, he settled in Kolozsvár. He performed his inaugural address at the Marosvásárhely Protestant College on 4 May, 1804. For the next 47 years, he was professor of mathematics, physics, chemistry and astronomy at the college that today bears his name. His life work is of an extraordinary diversity; however, he was most outstanding as a mathematician. His first works treat the parallel axiom. His masterpiece, the Tentamen (Marosvásárhely, 1832) contains his reflections on the foundations of mathematics, a number of innovative thoughts ahead of his time. He originally intended his books on mathematics as textbooks. He was an outstanding theoretical pedagogue; he wrote several works calling for changes in public education. Some of the points he argued for were a more cleverly organized curriculum and practical education. Bolyai János (1802-1860) was one of the greatest personalities in the history of mathematics. He broke new grounds in science: the creation of Non-Euclidian geometry revolutionized geometry and the theory of physics and replaced Newtonian theories about the world. He was born in Kolozsvár, on 15 December, 1802. He was brought up in Marosvásárhely and attended the Protestant College. He showed a great interest in mathematics as a child. However, due to the limited financial possibilities of the family he couldn’t attend the University of Göttingen; instead, he went to the Military Academy of Vienna. The military career was a burden to him. He entered the army engineering corps and was sent to Temesvár, Arad and then to Olmütz; then, at the age of 30, he retired and moved home to Marosvásárhely. He lived a retiring life here and on his estate in Domáld, which the family had inherited from Farkas Bolyai’s mother. From a young age, János Bolyai was interested by the unsolved problems of mathematics, most of all the 9th axiom of Euclid, the Postulate of the Parallels. With hard work, he developed Non-Euclidian Geometry as early as in 1823. He wrote down his findings in his work entitled Scientia Spatii, which was only published in 1832, as an appendix to his father’s book Tentamen. One of the greatest achievements of the age, it still didn’t bring any change in Bolyai’s life. His name remained unknown for the world of science.
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