Jakob Steiner was born in 1796 in Utzensdorf, Switzerland and died in 1863 in Bern, Switzerland. He came from a farming family and had little formal education as a child, but showed an early talent for calculation. He later attended a school run by Pestalozzi where he was both a student and teacher. Though he received only a limited license in mathematics, Steiner went on to make important contributions to the fields of synthetic and projective geometry. In his later years, illness increasingly prevented him from working, but he left a portion of his fortune to support educational opportunities for poor children in his hometown.