William Kingdon Clifford called Lobachevsky the "Copernicus of Geometry" due to the revolutionary character of his work.

At Kazan University, Lobachevsky was influenced by professor Johann Christian Martin Bartels, a former teacher and friend of the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).

In 1811, in his student days, Lobachevsky was accused by a vengeful supervisor of atheism (Russian: признаки безбожия, lit.

), 1826 to the session of the department of physics and mathematics, and this research was printed in the periodical 'Kazan University Course Notes' as On the Origin of Geometry (О началах геометрии) between 1829 and 1830.

In 1829 Lobachevsky wrote a paper about his ideas called "A Concise Outline of the Foundations of Geometry" that was published by the Kazan Messenger but was rejected when it was submitted to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences for publication.

Some mathematicians and historians have wrongly claimed that Lobachevsky in his studies in non-Euclidean geometry was influenced by Gauss, which is untrue.

[18] Lobachevsky's magnum opus Geometriya was completed in 1823, but was not published in its exact original form until 1909, long after he had died.

E. T. Bell wrote about Lobachevsky's influence on the following development of mathematics in his 1937 book Men of Mathematics:[22] The boldness of his challenge and its successful outcome have inspired mathematicians and scientists in general to challenge other "axioms" or accepted "truths", for example the "law" of causality which, for centuries, have seemed as necessary to straight thinking as Euclid's postulate appeared until Lobachevsky discarded it.

In the song, Lehrer portrays a Russian mathematician who sings about how Lobachevsky influenced him: "And who made me a big success / and brought me wealth and fame?

According to Lehrer, the song is "not intended as a slur on [Lobachevsky's] character" and the name was chosen "solely for prosodic reasons".

In the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, "Dick and the Single Girl" (season 2 episode 24) originally aired on May 11 1997, Sonja Umdahl (Christine Baranski),[24] a forgotten colleague who is transferring to teach at another university, gives as the reason behind her departure that Columbia is the only holder of Nikolai Lobachevsky's manuscripts.