The Fateful Year, 1818

Abstract

The twenty-three year-old Bernt Michael Holmboe was now responsible for all the mathematical teaching at Christiania Cathedral School. Holmboe had become a university student in the summer of 1814, and had been a zealous spokesman for the voluntary student corps, which had been set up when the Swedish forces had advanced into Norway. He had taken the university’s Second Examination with distinction, had followed S0ren Rasmussen’s lectures in mathematics, both the obligatory ones and those Rasmussen gave on topics of special interest. B. M. Holmboe had decided to go on with mathematics, even though it was not a course of studies that led to any public service examination: there were no public service exams in the sciences. By 1815 he had already become an assistant to Lektor Hansteen who that year had been made professor and most certainly needed the services of a good mathematician for his astronomical calculations. Holmboe studied mathematics on his own, had received a little teaching experience at the newly-opened Institute of Commerce, and above all, he had a well-thought-out view of what mathematics really was, and how it could best be learned.