a provincial mathematician working near Bern, an 'ass for the world' (i.e., not very practical), but that he learned languages like child's play, and that they should take him with them as a translator. Schläfli accompanied them to Italy, and benefited much from the trip. They stayed for more than six months, during which time Schläfli even translated some of the others' mathematical works into Italian. Later life Schläfli kept up a correspondence with Steiner till 1856. The vistas that had been opened up to him encouraged him to apply for a position at the university in Bern in 1847, where he was appointed(?) in 1848. He stayed until his retirement in 1891, and spent his remaining time studying Sanskrit and translating the Hindu scripture Rig Veda into German, until his death in 1895. Higher dimensions Schläfli is one of the three architects of multidimensional geometry, together with Arthur Cayley and Bernhard Riemann. Around 1850 the general concept of Euclidean space had not been developed – but linear equations in variables were well understood. In the 1840s William Rowan Hamilton had developed his quaternions and John T. Graves and Arthur Cayley the octonions. The latter two systems worked with bases of four and, respectively, eight elements, and suggested an interpretation analogous to the cartesian coordinates in three-dimensional space. From 1850 to 1852 Schläfli worked on his magnum opus, Theorie der vielfachen Kontinuität, in which he initiated the study of the linear geometry of -dimensional space. He also defined the -dimensional sphere and calculated its volume. He then wanted to have this work published. It was sent to the Akademie in Vienna, but was refused because of its size. Afterwards it was sent to Berlin, with the same result. After a long bureaucratic pause, Schläfli was asked in 1854 to write a shorter version, but he did not do so. Steiner then tried to help him getting the work published in Crelle's Journal, but somehow things didn't work out. The exact reasons remain unknown. Portions of the work were published by Cayley in English in 1860. The first publication of the entire manuscript was only in 1901, after Schläfli's death. The first review of the book then appeared in the Dutch mathematical journal Nieuw Archief voor de Wiskunde in 1904, written by the Dutch mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute. During this period, Riemann held his famous Habilitationsvortrag Über die Hypothesen welche der