Richard Dedekind's father was a professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Brunswick. His mother was the daughter of a professor who also worked at the Collegium Carolinum. Richard was the youngest of four children and never married. He was to live with one of his sisters, who also remained unmarried, for most of his adult life.
He attended school in Brunswick from the age of seven and at this stage mathematics was not his main interest. The school, Martino-Catharineum, was a good one and Dedekind studied science, in particular physics and chemistry. However, physics became less than satisfactory to Dedekind with what he considered an imprecise logical structure and his attention turned towards mathematics.
The Collegium Carolinum was an educational institution between a high school and a university and he entered it in 1848 at the age of 16. There he was to receive a good understanding of basic mathematics studying differential and integral calculus, analytic geometry and the foundations of analysis. He entered the University of Göttingen in the spring of 1850 with a solid grounding in mathematics.
Göttingen was a rather disappointing place to study mathematics at this time, and it had not yet become the vigorous research centre that it turned into soon afterwards. Mathematics was directed by M A Stern and G Ulrich. Gauss also taught courses in mathematics, but mostly at an elementary level. The physics department was directed by Listing and Wilhelm Weber. The two departments combined to initiate a seminar which Dedekind joined from its beginning. There he learnt number theory which was the most advanced material he studied. His other courses covered material such as the differential and integral calculus, of which he already had a good understanding. The first course to really make Dedekind enthusiastic was, rather surprisingly, a course on experimental physics taught by Weber. More likely it wasWeber who inspired Dedekind rather than the topic of the course.
In the autumn term of 1850, Dedekind attended his first course given by Gauss. It was a course on least squares and [1]
.. fifty years later Dedekind remembered the lectures as the most beautiful he had ever heard, writing that he had followed Gauss with constantly increasing interest and that he could not forget the experience.
Dedekind did his doctoral work in four semesters under Gauss's supervision and submitted a thesis on the theory of Eulerian integrals. He received his doctorate from Göttingen in 1852 and he was to be the last pupil of Gauss. However he was not well trained in advanced mathematics and fully realised the deficiencies in his mathematical education.
At this time Berlin was the place where courses were given on the latest mathematical developments but Dedekind had not been able to learn such material at Göttingen. By this time Riemann was also at Göttingen and he too found that the mathematical education was aimed at students who were intending to become secondary school teachers, not those with the very top abilities who would go on to research careers. Dedekind therefore spent the two years following the award of his doctorate learning the latest mathematical developments and working for his habilitation.
In 1854 both Riemann and Dedekind were awarded their habilitation degrees within a few weeks of each other. Dedekind was then qualified as a university teacher and he began teaching at Göttingen giving courses on probability and geometry.
Gauss died in 1855 and Dirichlet was appointed to fill the vacant chair at Göttingen. This was an extremely important event for Dedekind who found working with Dirichlet extremely profitable. He attended courses by Dirichlet on the theory of numbers, on potential theory, on definite integrals, and on partial differential equations. Dedekind and Dirichlet soon became close friends and the relationship was in many ways the making of Dedekind, whose mathematical interests took a new lease of life with the discussions between the two. Bachmann, who was a student in Göttingen at this time [12]:-