Ludwig Schläfli (15 January 1814 – 20 March 1895) was a Swiss mathematician, specialising in geometry and complex analysis (at the time called function theory) who was one of the key figures in developing the notion of higher-dimensional spaces.

He was born in Grasswil (now part of Seeberg), his mother's hometown, and moved to nearby Burgdorf as a child.

[3] Instead, he entered the gymnasium in Bern in 1829, at age 15, already deep into study of mathematics by way of a calculus text, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner's Mathematische Anfangsgründe der Analysis des Unendlichen.

[3] Schläfli did pioneering research in the geometry of spaces of more than three dimensions, recorded in a treatise Theorie der vielfachen Kontinuität that he wrote between 1850 and 1852.

Only then was its importance recognized, for instance by Pieter Hendrik Schoute, who wrote that "This treatise surpasses in scientific value a good portion of everything that has been published up to the present day in the field of multidimensional geometry.