Lobachevsky was born in Novgorod, Russia and receceived his higher education at the University of Kazan; he was to spend his entire profession life associated with the university: student, faculty member, librarian, construction supervisor, and ultimately, rector. He was completely devoted to the university and was considered to be an excellent administrator. He considered no task beneath him; there is a story about a foreign visitor who was amazed at the erudition of a janitor - Lobachevsky. Mathematically, he was one of the discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry, along with Gauss and Janos Bolyai, and was the first to publish - in Kazanski Vestnik, a journal published locally at the University of Kazan. His work was slow to gain acceptance; this is due to it revolutionary character, the inability of Russian mathematicians to understand it (Ostrogradsky at St. Petersberg gave Lobachevsky's major paper a bad review, clearly not seeing its purpose), and its unavailability to european mathematicians. This came to an end when a version of it was published in Crelle's Journal and with the sponsorship of Gauss, Lobachevsky was elected a member of the Gottingen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften.