Nikolai Lobachevsky publishes in 1829 in the Kazansky Vestnik the first description of a geometry that denies Euclid's parallel postulate, constructing a coherent system in which infinitely many parallels pass through a point exterior to a line. It is the first documented break with Euclidean geometry in 2,000 years. János Bolyai independently develops the same geometry in 1832 (Hungary), with no knowledge of Lobachevsky. Carl Friedrich Gauss had reached similar conclusions but did not publish them; on learning of Lobachevsky's work he wrote privately that nothing in it surprised him, without citing him publicly. Hyperbolic geometry is today foundational to Einstein's general relativity and to modern topology.