Bernhard Riemann was so shy he could barely deliver a lecture, yet his 1854 habilitation talk — a single presentation delivered to a handful of professors — described a geometry of curved space that would become the mathematical language of Einstein's general relativity sixty years later. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine, leaving behind a body of work so compressed and so profound that mathematicians are still unpacking it.

This episode traces Riemann from his impoverished German childhood through the geometry lecture that bent space itself, the hypothesis about prime numbers that remains unsolved, and the early death that cut short one of the most fertile mathematical minds in history.

• Riemann's poverty, his crippling shyness, and the father who wanted him to become a pastor
• The 1854 habilitation lecture that descr ...